Welcome to the Gamer Dad podcast where we talk about all things
Magic the Gathering and gaming. We strive to make things fun,
fit into our busy lives, families, keep things casual and
show you how you can too. I'm gamer dad Bob, a gamer since
1987. And you ever get the feeling of
Deja Vu? I'm an IT manager, lover of
sports RPGs, father of one very energetic 5 year old who just
started kindergarten, brought home a sickness.
I have COVID thanks to him and apparently is quite the
storyteller according to his teacher.
And I'm Jesse Hoagy, gamer, guitar player, and full time dad
trying to keep up with his two daughters who can already beat
him in Mario Kart. And I'm not teaching them how to
drift. I'm probably losing a game on
Marvel Snap, drawing terrible hands and Magic Gathering, or
analyzing why gaming villains are sometimes way cooler than
heroes. I'd just be Expedition 33 and
I'm emotionally broken. All right, pause, pause.
So I just want to say I'm like super proud of you for finishing
a game first and foremost, because this is finish it.
This is not something that Jesse does.
This is a big deal chat and and anybody listening because I
recall you saying at the end of Act 2 you're like, Oh my God,
what's the point? I did, I did, and then by the
end of act three I was blubbering like a baby again,
sending messages like 10:00 at night like what the heck just
happened? Yeah, I I was the same way.
It was. It was a rough, rough ending.
The game just tugged on every emotion that you could find.
So this is a big deal for Jesse. And he finished the game that I
recommended, which is even more rare, mind you.
Usually I recommend games to you.
Yeah, so, you know, slow clap for Jesse on that one.
So next I I finished it so I can have my whole slate clean for
Ghost of Yo Tai. Although now Hades 2 is coming
out in 2 weeks. Yeah.
Anyway, so buckle up, lower expectations, and remember, if
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If you're a gamer, a parent, you might relate.
Finally, don't forget to stick around for our trivia tonight.
I'm sure I totally won't come up with it during the podcast and
have one planned ahead of time. I promise, I promise.
All right, let's get into it today because this is a fun one.
We're going to talk about villains, Video game villains in
particular. Not just bosses, not just end of
level. We're going to talk about the
ones that scare us, the ones that make us laugh, the ones
that just refuse to stay dead. This isn't a tier list or who's
the greatest of all time, so we're not going to be arguing
that. It's just all about the villains
that stuck with us. The ones you still remember long
after you put the controller down.
And as you're listening, think about yours.
Which villain do you still carry with you and why?
So our first segment touches on the villains who never die.
And I always argue that movies need good villains and and
villains that never die is very important.
And that's why I think the Marvel Universe did so well with
the Thanos thing for a very long time because they dragged him in
as kind of the puppet master pulling strings and and
everything else. And the villains that never die
are the best the best ones. Spoilers.
I was just going to say something One of Jesse's later
ones. I mean the Spider man 3 movie
killing off Venom was like, what?
What the hell was that? You killed off one of the best
Spider man villains of all time in a movie.
The best spider man villain of all time in my opinion.
Like so he. He is his like his Yang to his
Yang. So by the way, again, if I sound
stuffed up, it's because my son brought COVID home from
kindergarten and I'm just on the tail end of it.
I want to talk about a couple of early, early ones from the
Nintendo days that that didn't quite make it bubble to the top.
But let's talk about Dracula from the Castlevania series and
Mother Brain and Metroid. Those are some very classic
immortal enemies, bosses. You know, Dracula is always
resurrected. He just always comes back.
And it's usually the damn Belmont family that's doing it.
So it's, it's like we have to kill Dracula.
Shit, he's already dead. Let's bring him back and do it
again. We need something to do for the
game #2. And mother Brain has been around
forever and now I, I know Metroid is kind of moved away
from mother Brain being the bad guy.
And it's it's definitely more about the Metroids.
Go figure, the title creature there.
But mother Brain was always one that that was curious to me.
It kept coming back in in in different ways.
But mine, my favorite bad guy that always came back is Doctor
Wiley. And I have him tattooed on my
arm. There he is, our dude with the,
the UFO and the, the, the eyebrows.
The the Magnum Pi eyebrows thing.
You know, did you ever watch Magnum Pi, Jesse?
No, I didn't. So Tom Selleck would look at the
camera at the intro and do the the eyebrows thing and Doctor
Wiley's doing that as he's escaping in his thing.
So who is Doctor Wiley? He is a former colleague of
Doctor Light. That's the protagonist good guy
and and you turn bitter rival, jealousy being the root.
And it's always the same cycle with Doctor Wiley build these
new robot masters, then Mega Man tears through them.
You go into his fortress, which is like a, a, a, a snake pit of
traps and everything and some different bosses.
And then you get to Wiley, you defeat him and he makes a
dramatic escape and you get through Mega Man one.
It's that you get through Mega Man 2.
It's that. And then Mega Man three, you're
like, yes, you finally catch him, right?
He doesn't run off the screen or anything.
And then his head pops and it's a spring.
It was actually Doctor Wiley robot, you know, And then at
Mega Man 5, they frame Proto Man.
That's a nice twist. But of course it's it's Doctor
Wiley again. The bad guy isn't Proto Man.
Are you kidding me? Get out of here.
And he always has that, that, that UFO that I have tattooed.
So that's always fun. He's iconic.
And Wiley always resonated with me as a kid because of he just
never goes away. He's he's that bad guy.
He's like, I'm just going to send all these robots at Mega
Man. He's going to do his best.
And of course Mega Man's going to win because it's Mega Man.
I mean, he's awesome. And then why is Wiley so cool?
He always endorse and persistent villains always feel mythic to
me, right? It's not stale because it's the
same guy. And it's like, why can't we beat
this guy? Why won't he go away?
He's petty, he's ridiculous. And yet somehow, for me at
least, Wiley is lovable. That's why I have that tattoo,
because it's not just a game about Mega Man, Proto Man,
Doctor Light, the robots. It's about Wiley.
And and like, the crazier thing is like I was thinking about it
today as I was preparing for the podcast and I was like, if your
Dragon Ball Z fan, like Doctor Wiley and Doctor Jarreau are
almost the same person. And that's a weird thing of like
branching evolution as far as characters go, because Akira
Toriyama did not take any influence from Doctor Wiley from
Capcom. So these are two very similar
characters who make robots, who are evil geniuses whose legacy
lives on after they're dead, because after Wiley's dead, he
created Zero in the Mega Man X universe 0 contained a virus,
the Sigma virus. So there's all kinds of stuff
that that's tied in and and like in Dragon Ball Z, Doctor Giroux
creates the androids, creates Cell after he's dead, Cell does
things. It's just, it's so wild how much
parallels there are. And I was Googling it.
I was like, come on, Toriyama had to take something.
He's like, that had to be Doctor Wilson.
And it's not there. There's no evidence that
Toriyama took Doctor Wiley and said, I'm making Doctor Giroux
this character. So man, it's crazy how things
work. It's like, we're going to take
this trope here and we're just going to run with it.
Capcom's like, we have our thing.
Toriyama says. Dragon Ball Z will have its own
thing from the Red Ribbon Army. And they just ran with it and,
and it was so fun researching that and everything.
I was like, come on, there's got to be something here.
But there wasn't. So that's why Doctor Wiley makes
the first part of my list so fun, because he just doesn't go
away. And these kinds of bad guys are
the best ones in my opinion, and that's why they're in Segment 1.
So mine it's two of them that are sharing the same the same
kind of vein that won't go away. Mine are from two different
games also both published by Nintendo and it is Bowser and
Ganondorf, two different games. Mario Brothers, Zelda.
So same general premise of like your Mega Man guy.
They never die, they always come back no matter how many times
you think you beat and they never die.
I'm kind of going one good, one bad.
So Bowser in my opinion, as I'm getting older, it always seems
the same. The boss battle with him always
seems the same. Everything, the whole trope, the
whole story behind him always seems the same.
It's always his unhealthy obsession with Peach.
He kidnaps her and you have to go save her.
And and really and and maybe I haven't played enough of the non
main Mario games but like Odyssey is the only one to me
that felt like changed up the boss battle with him.
But all the other ones seem exactly the same.
Whereas Ganondorf the battles are similar but they're
different enough that where every game it's like it's he's
evolving. It's like Ganondorf to me feels
like Jason from Friday the 13th, like you're finally dead, you're
good, blah, blah, blah. Everybody's rejoicing, Roll
credits. And then his arm comes up or
something. Something happens.
Gandorf really is the main one here because he has a whole
mythology behind him. Oh yeah.
Whereas Bowser is just I like that girl, I'm going to kidnap
girl until she likes me. What is?
What is that? Is it?
I don't know. The unhealthy obsession is a
pretty good way to frame it. Like what?
What is that? But Gandorf, he is truly
immortal, and it is the central theme of all of the Zelda games
really. And it's really two factors I'm
going to dive in a little bit of mythology with.
So you have the cursive Demise and the power of the Triforce.
So Demise's curse ensures that Gandorf, as the embodiment of
hatred, like he's the embodiment of hatred, will always be reborn
and always be resurrected to plague each new generation of
Lincoln Zelda. Meanwhile A Triforce which
Gandorf inevitably claims in every single era grants him God
like strength, longevity. Longevity and resilience makes
him very hard to kill and with permanently and with that power
he can survive any fatal wounds and only special divine weapons
like the Master sword or some games plus arrows.
The light arrows. The right arrows Yep, can
destroy him physically physically, and even then his
malice can linger beyond his death, which can be seen as
Calamity Gannon in a later games and his spirit will reincarnate
given a new any time enough time goes through.
So he effectively cannot truly die as long as the cycle, the
Triforce and the goddess's bloodline continues.
So he's always going to be there.
So that's why I crossed all of the zealot of games, no matter
which one from the ancient going all the way back when they go
back and they all this is when I started to the new stuff like in
tears in the Kingdom, he's always coming back.
He's eternal, he's the embodiment of evil in the whole
game. So to me Bowser is in my opinion
lazy design and very outdated whereas Ganderorff has a whole
mythology behind it and it's like he's reinvented and
refreshed every time whereas Bowser he just comes back and
does the same thing every. Yeah, he, he's, he really is
like that. I'm going to kidnap the
Princess, throw her in a tower trope, you know, and and what,
what is Bowser? He's he's he's like a lizard
king, right? I I mean, yeah, but what is he
going to do with a human Princess?
That's just weird, guys. And sometimes, like you, you
fight his kids. I guess they are.
Yeah, there's. Bowser Junior.
And then there's, like, all of the kids, the Ludwigs, the
where's the mom? Iggy Koopa's the yeah, where is
the mom? Where's where's Bowser's?
I don't know, man. Maybe he adopted them all.
Fun, fun fact, after the the Mario movie, my daughter's like,
where's Bowser's wife? I'm like, I don't know.
And then she's playing the games like these are Bowser kids.
Where's the mom? It's this is just running joke
with you. And I was like, who who's the
Bowser's wife? Who's the mom of all these kids?
OK, that's, that's great. You know, Ganondorf is one of my
my favorite bad guys too. So I'm glad you covered him
because the The Legend of Zelda games are just so iconic.
Those, I mean, clearly I'm wearing a Legend of Zelda shirt
tonight. Deliberately.
Any of the Legend of Zelda tattoo?
I have plenty of Zelda tattoos. There's a hilly and shield right
there. There is Link Between Worlds,
the little mosaic guy coming popping out.
I have a Triforce up here. There it is.
So I have plenty of Legend of Zelda tattoos.
Freaking love those. You still.
Won't play the new games. They're too hard.
You know how I stand on that. They're just, they're too hard.
They're too sandboxy. It's not my thing.
And, and unfortunately, that means Zelda's probably going to
leave me behind. Like, I don't know what Calamity
Gannon is. I, I don't know any of that or,
or what those creepy hand things are that are, are chasing you
all over in in tears of the Kingdom.
I, I will never know what any of that is because I just can't get
into those games. And that's OK.
I, I mean, if you look at the very first game, like if you let
the title run, you get a little bit of the back story and
everything, but you don't know why Gannon is like doing Gannon
things. You just know he's like this
weird pig monster bad guy, that's all.
And. I you saying you're not going to
play the games like I'm not going to play the high rule
warriors games. No, I'm not either.
I I tried the first one I'm like this is just isn't for me.
I love the Dynasty Warriors game, so I was like, Oh yeah,
high rule warriors and everything, and it played like a
dumbed down version of Dynasty Warriors and I just didn't care
for it. There's more nuance and
everything to the Romance of the Three Kingdom story than there
is to the high rule Kingdom story.
There's more depth to it. I mean the Romance of the Three
Kingdom I've got in two gigantic take books on the bookshelf up
there. It is a very long Chinese story.
So there's a lot of material that they can build into the
Dynasty warriors games. And I'm sure you could put a lot
of stuff from Zelda into books and everything, but not
romantically 3 kingdoms big and there's not as many characters
either. It's kind of it's kind of hard
to do. Gannon's a good one.
Jesse, that was a good pick. I like that.
So moving on to segment 2, as we as we move into our bad guys and
everything one and done's your bad guys from games that just
they're the only bad guy. They don't come back.
You see him one time. And for me that's real simple.
My favorite bad guy period, hands down, no debate for me is
Kafka from Final Fantasy 6. And he's also on my arm
somewhere right there. There he is, there he is.
You can hear him laughing in the tattoo.
Jesse doesn't know that because he hasn't played the game.
I know. It's the magic card Kafka.
That's quite OK. So Kafka's awesome.
He's like, it's hard to explain because he's one of those bad
guys that kind of wins at the midpoint of the game, like at
the end of act one. But like, I was prepping for
tonight and I was like, you know what?
I have played this game and I kid you not, I've probably
played Final Fantasy 6 start to finish like 30-40 times, no
exaggeration. And there's no lore dump on his
origins within the game. There's some very small
implications on where he started, what his deal is.
So I was like, OK, I need to research this.
So as I was prepping the the deal with Kefka is he was the
very first human magitech infusion experiment.
Jesse's going, I don't know what that is.
Nope. Listeners, if you don't know
what that is, let me explain. In this world and Final Fantasy,
humans are not born with the gift of magic.
It has to be infused in them through very, very weird
scientific genetic alterations to human bodies.
And Kefka was the very first person that they succeeded with,
but it was kind of unstable. You know, he got the power of
magic and everything, but in the process, it fried his mind so
suddenly he's cruel and chaotic and it and it just makes more
sense than going. Why is this guy just this weird
psycho court jester mage clown type guy and and Kefka's
insanity. Just as the game goes, his his
sanity just continues to plummet.
Right. So you're playing this game and
you get these what the hell moments throughout the story,
like near the very beginning, he decides, I didn't get the answer
I liked from someone, so I'm just going to burn the entire
castle down, just punish everyone, just burn them all
alive, no big deal. And then later he poisons an
entire castle of people by poisoning their water supply.
And one of the gut punches is like one of the soldiers comes
up to him. He goes, you know, we have
captives in that castle and Kafka's like, well, they were
stupid enough to get caught, by the way.
Where have we heard that before? Without getting too deep into
our American politics, where have we heard that before?
And he kills them too. He does, just doesn't care.
And then you have multiple encounters with this this bad
guy as as the game goes on and you're like, finally I get to
kill this asshole and you don't. He escapes and he gets slightly
more powerful, but he's really kind of nerfed, if you will.
He's strong enough to get to put up a fight when you face him,
but ultimately he just doesn't go away until the end of the
game, until the end of act one where he actually achieves his
goals. He finds these magic statues,
the warring triad. That's a magic cartoon Jesse
that holds the entire balance of magic in the world and what does
he do? He absorbs their magic.
He stands in the middle of them and he absorbs their magic and
becomes basically God like because he absorbs all of their
magic that supplies pretty much the world of magic and he ends
up destroying the planet. Essentially.
He tears it to pieces and it becomes the, the, the formal
names for the world's are the world of balance, which is the
normal world that you're in, towns and everything.
And then the world of ruin, where Kafka essentially
rearranges the face of the globe.
All the continents are shifted. Things that were buried
underwater are suddenly above ground again, things that were
above ground or below. He shreds things up and he sits
in this tower of junk that he created and he has this thing
called the light of judgement. It's basically just a, a fire
laser that he can torch towns with at will because he can't.
And you know, you get through the end of act one, you're like,
Oh my God, we lost, we lost. And act 2 starts and you have to
find your entire party again. And you're traveling the world
and getting your party back together.
And finally you get to Kefka's tower.
And you get there and you get to the final area.
And he gives this huge speech and monologue at the end about
how irrelevant life is and how he wants to destroy everything.
This guy is a true narcissist and the battle I'm going to show
off tattoo again. Here is this thing right?
So you start with this guy and then you climb further and
further and further up and it's it's a four part battle, OK, And
it's just epic. And you get to Kafka and the way
that they they designed him. He's like this twisted Angel
form. So he's like a God.
It's like, you know, the, the, the Michelangelo picture where
they're, they're touching, you know, kind of imagine Kefka
looking like that kind of just a little loincloth with some wings
and everything going just God like.
And, and the fight is hard. The music elevates that.
If you look up the, the final song dancing mad, by the way,
magic card Kefka dancing mad. It's beautiful, absolutely
beautiful. And, and I think there's a live
performance of it done by the the Final Fantasy Symphony.
And he's got this signature move in this battle.
It's called fall in one. At least that's what it was
called in the in the old SNES days.
And what to do? It drops your entire party to
one hit point. There's no dodging it, there's
no buffing against it. It just puts you down to one,
one hit point and you have to respond quickly.
Either pop a mega elixir, pop a heel, do something because if
you don't, he's just going to wipe you with his next attack.
And if you're under leveled like I've done a couple times,
because again, every once in a while I like a challenge with
this game, the fight becomes really unforgiving because
you're not dishing out enough damage for him and he'll get two
or three swipes at you with that fallen one that you have to
respond to. And I remember this one
playthrough I got through, I was under leveled and the character
Locke, who is the thief of the party, call me Treasure Hunter.
He's my last guy standing at this point.
And I was like, Oh my God, the fight with Kafka dragged on and
I just hit the attack button because that's really all he's
good for. And I discovered that they built
in these things called desperation attacks in the video
game. And if you if you Google it, if
you YouTube it, they're they're each character has a desperation
attack that may or may not trigger when they're at critical
health and locks triggered. And it killed Kafka.
Yeah. I mean, talk about like the
ultimate ending swipe that I had on him.
So that was really, really funny.
It was just an unforgettable icing on the cake for me.
And why does Kefka endure in my mind?
Well, one. Final Fantasy 6 is one of my
favorite video games of all time, start to finish.
The cast, the way they designed it, the story that they tell and
everything is great. But Kefka in particular, his
insanity, the spectacle of him, the challenge at the end, in
that singular climactic exit, he doesn't just dissolve off the
screen, right? He slowly dissolves into dust as
you've destroyed him, as if he's just vanishing from existence.
And in a way, Kafka got what he wanted.
It was really poetic. So that's why Kafka is my
favorite, favorite villain, hands down.
One off, one off villain in particular here.
And Jesse, I think you've got a fun one too.
So I got a question first though, why are always our gods
and God like characters so scantily clothed?
You know they don't like clothes.
They don't need clothes anymore. What is it with a loincloth?
I don't know man, I'd if I was God like I'd probably be walking
around in the buff too. Does that mean Tarzan is God
like? Maybe.
Anyway, my choice it's it wasn't
even a choice. It was like the easiest thing to
me is the one and done. And it wasn't really the big
boss of the whole game. It's the big boss of a certain
area of the game, and that's the Bloody Baron from Witcher 3.
This is an interesting spin, so pay attention, Chad.
Might be my all time favorite bad guy, but is he really a bad
guy? So the moment that girl that's
the main protagonist. For those who doesn't know, the
Witcher meets the Bloody Baron and you meet him on Crow's
Perch. It's clear that he's not just a
bad guy, his name is Philip Stranger.
Bloody Baron is like kind of a new name for him.
He's a warlord, he's a war load. He's very violent.
He's known for his violent temper and it's what they call a
three mile long cruel street. So, and that's in Gerald's
journals because like you, when you meet people, you have kind
of like a bestiary type thing and, and read journals in there
as the whole quest unfolds. The Baron, he, he, he's not
really your whole 2 dimensional dark Lord type person.
He's so much deeper than that. He's not the ultimate villain.
He's really just a tragically flawed person.
Tragically isn't. That's even an understatement in
my opinion. Yes, I would, I would, I would
angle even like cursed. Like, I know, not like cursed,
deliberately cursed, but like cursed by the gods if you will.
So in in his past, he, his wife Anna, he beats her, which causes
a miscarriage. He terrorizes all the people
that he's ruling over, which makes him an antagonist for
sure. But he also has remorse like his
missing daughter that we have to help find.
He he truly misses her and he truly loves her and he kind of
has a certain charm about him and you could tell that there's
good in him. You know, after doing searching
and stuff, someone summarized him well.
It says brash and boorish but with a kind of charm, a drunk
and bad husband and father but knows this makes.
But he knows that he's that and makes his realization that he's
lost everything like totally sad.
Like Mole Quest is just just a gut punch.
It is. And the fact that he's so self
aware and you can sell that he has guilt is totally UN unlike
any other villain. I think like most, most villains
don't feel remorse. They don't feel guilt and he
does. And that the writer themselves,
the quest writer, says nobody is only good and no one is simply
evil. A black and white world would be
plain boring, as would a black and white game.
So he is Gray mortality twitty. Morality.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Twitty and his character kind of
theme is mirrors the themes of fatherhood and lost that Geralt
has with Siri, and I think that's a perfect way to start
the game. It's kind of like to me the the
big the least from when I was playing, the first big thing to
me is gross Perch and that and what a way to start the game,
man. Like it's amazing.
Yeah, you are. You are fully invested in the
game at that point. Like you're like, OK, this is a
massive quest, a massive undertaking with so many
branches and and pieces that have to pull it together.
And you've got this one dude, the Bloody Baron, who you just
want to punch, but you. Feel bad about doing it.
There's even. I think.
I think there's a certain part in the game where girl does hit
him. Yeah, they fight, Yeah, because
he because he's hammered. Yeah.
And like they have like a fist fight and really like, the way
it kind of goes wrong is Baron is kind of like a dark
reflection of what Gorrell could be.
Yeah, under different circumstances.
Like it has so much layers to the relationship and like he he
sheltered and saved Siri when she was running from something
I'm going to talk about later. And she's like she was an
orphan. She need she was in need.
So he cared for her and gave her shelter and protected her.
And that's very good to him, which adds some more like Gray
apart. But he's not really a hero and
he's not really a villain. Like to like the definition of
it. He is a tragic person and it's,
it's often discussed along like between my research, he he's
brought up as some of the greatest villains of all time.
And it's and it's it's, it's, it wasn't surprising to me, but it
the thing I like about is it's so intimate and self-contained.
Like outside. Once you're done with that,
depending on your choices, you never think or see or hear about
him again. Like there's some choices where
you do see him hanging from a tree, but it depends on your
choice. And he's not reoccurring.
He's not coming back. It's just this happens, gut
punch done, and then you move on and you're like, yeah, I want to
do that again. Like is there is I don't know
how many times I played that game and redid that whole quest
line just to see what other choices and what other outcomes
come of it. Yeah, I, I think there's three
major outcomes, right. I think there's only two.
I could be wrong. There's there's, I've gotten 3,
so you've got the the good. Ending on it.
The good ending, right? He's he's reunited with wife,
daughter. Yep.
The wife is turned into a hag ending.
Yep. And then the tree and.
Then the tree, yeah. So I I haven't gotten the hag
one I guess. The hag one was interesting.
I did that by accident. You got to replay Witcher 3 now.
Jesse I was just gonna say it means I have to replay The
Witcher 3, but there there's so many different like examples of
like 1 and done characters like a Gunter or Dim.
He's my favorite. He was amazing.
My favorite. That entire Hearts of Stone
story was so creepy. Freaking loved it.
Very creepy, but and it's it's just I love the fact that he's
not like some supernatural demon.
He's not like this all powerful person.
He is just a tragic classic literary character and he's not
your conventional game boss. Yep.
And you, you, the only fight you have with the Bloody Baron is a
fist fight in a yeah, there's no actual boss fight with him,
right? It's it's incredibly personal to
grow like it's incredibly personal just because they have
Siri there and as you discover the crap that he's done to his
family and then you have the whole botchling thing and
burying his on board kid because he killed, you know, or cause
his wife to miscarry. It's it's just incredibly
personal and it's it's just so well done.
He will always be my favorite or one of my favorites.
He's so good, so good. So do we think the impact comes
from knowing they only exist in one story?
Do we think that's kind of like, it's like one of those those
FOMO things kind of where you're like, oh man, this guy's so
good. I, I, I want him to come back.
But at the same time, it's so like you said, it's, it's just
encapsulated in, in this one story.
Does that make it better or does it make it worse?
It's hard to say sometimes. Like I I would have loved to
have seen Kafka come back, but sometimes, like existing in just
one story, it makes it all that more impactful.
Yeah, I think, I think his whole character arc, like speaking the
Baron himself would have, I think of overstayed as welcome.
If. If he was present throughout the
whole game. So for him specifically, I think
having it that short and contained into short.
You could you could go through that for like 15 hours of
gameplay before you wrap that story.
Contained into Crow's perch, I think was terrific.
Yeah, I agree. I agree.
Bloody Baron is a very interesting character.
It's tragic. I have to download it on my
switch too. There you go.
All right, Segment 3.
We're calling this one Forces of Nature.
This is an interesting one because it's like, is the game
just trying to kill you or is it this overarching huge celestial
type being the the the OR cosmic entity?
Is it an actual God that's against you?
For me, again, going back to my JRPG roots, it's Lavos from the
Chrono Trigger and Chronocross games.
Lavos. I had to think of a really good
way to describe him. So if you don't know who Lavos
is, I could describe him in 1-2 simple words.
Lavos is a gigantic space tick that Burrows into planets and
sucks the lifeblood out. OK so imagine like a meteorite
giant space tick burrowed into the center of the planet and
it's consuming the lifeblood of the planet.
The DNA of every being in the planet, the knowledge, the power
of every being. And it's only goal like ticks
are to grow and multiply and find other things to consume.
Except this is at a a cosmic level.
So think of Galactus right from the Marvel Universe.
But this is just a parasite instead of a cosmic deity.
And Lavos is very interesting because in Chrono Trigger, as
you find out early on, Lavos basically causes the end of
civilization as as they know it. You stumble into it when you
travel into the future and you see that the future is bleak and
barren and there's mutants and there's not a whole lot going
on. People are hungry all the time.
There's very few people around. There's robots.
Lavos is always this lurking presence, you know, just kind of
looming in the background. You know that Lavos is the is
the main antagonist and no matter which timeline you're in,
Lavos has some kind of an influence.
Because in the game story, Lavos arrived at 65,000,000 years BC.
So he's been sitting in the planet for a very long time.
And the world ends and Lavos emerges from his slumber in the
year 1999 AD. So 65,000,000 + 2000 years
basically. And after that, he multiplies
and he's ready to go. And you find this all out.
And then as you go from each timeline to timeline, you find
out his influence. You find out that in the Dark
Ages that there's a very powerful mage who is trying to
destroy Lavos. You find out in the age of
antiquity, which is even earlier than the Dark ages, you find out
that there is an advanced civilization, a powerful
civilization that that is relies on magic.
And they've got these machines and they they know that Lavos
exists and they're harnessing his energy.
And that energy turns the queen of that era a little cuckoo.
She's a little power obsessed and his influence on there and
on her daughter named Shala. And Lavos finds this this
magical conduit in Shala and he begins to obsess a little bit
too much about gaining her power and access to her.
So Lavos is always central to the story because he's
constantly in your face. You know, it's the bad guy.
You know, it is so why Labos sticks around.
It's because the game. It's not like this personal
vendetta, right? It's not like, Oh my God, Indigo
Montoya, you killed my father. Prepare to die.
It's this. We have to save the world.
We have to preserve the future so that that the future exists
not in the way it does. So this is more about altruism.
You fight to save the plan and the presentation of
inevitability with Labos is what makes him unforgettable and then
as you move into Chrono cross, the indirect sequel, Lavos is
very present and this right here.
I know this is you guys aren't going to see this very well.
This is the frozen flame, which is a Shard of Lavos and it is
the Big Mac guffin, if you will, in Chrono cross and Lavos in
Chrono Cross is actually grabbed Shala and has harnessed her
power. So now Lavos isn't just a space
tick, he is eternal with her and commands every timeline
imaginable. So not just like the straight
linear timeline, like every timeline.
He is called the time devourer at that point.
So Lavos is way bigger, way stronger, way more inevitable
come chrono cross time. And ultimately that's your bad
guy. And Lavos being that that force
that I guess space tick if we're going to downplay it is a big
reason why Kernel trigger became one of my favorite games because
it wasn't just a specific, it wasn't Kafka, it wasn't this bad
guy. It was this force.
And you play that game and there are several encounters you have
with Lavos where he just wipes your party.
It's a it's a scripted battle, so you don't get a game over.
But like, holy crap, how am I going to beat this guy?
You're telling me I'm going to I'm going to level up enough to
beat this guy toward the end of the game.
Forget it. I also have a special, special
shout out to another NES game. Do you ever play the game
Shadowgate, Jesse? No.
So Shadowgate is one of those story driven games where it's
just text based on the screen and you can do different things
with the screens that you're on and everything.
And it's Shadowgate, the force of nature, the castle itself,
the castle Shadowgate that you were in that was out to kill
you. There were so many ways to die
in that game because you clicked on the wrong thing or you did
the wrong thing, or you drank a potion that you didn't know what
it was. I mean, 100 ways to die in that
game. And it was so cool and it was
groundbreaking. And I after I finished the game
the first time, I played it a couple more times and
everything. And now I kid you not, I still
have the whole game memorized. I could probably speed run it.
Not like speed run TAS speed, but like I could probably beat
that game in an hour hour and a half sitting if I needed to
still. Wow.
I'd probably die once or twice because I forget something, but
like that game is just burned into my memory.
Is one of the coolest games where the environment is out to
get you. Like there's a early on, there's
like a book that you can take off a shelf and like you're
leaning over assumed and you take the book off and the just
the concrete slab just crushes you or, you know, or if you
click on the wrong thing that you slip and fall and die.
Or if you open the wrong thing, some slime goes and ET you know
it turns final. Destination the video game.
It's so cool. It's so cool.
You'll have to look it up. And again, it's just an old
school NES game from 1987. The Shadowgate was awesome,
awesome, awesome. I love that game.
So Chrono Trigger one Shadowgate, special recognition
for for the entire castle being out there.
Like if you didn't light a torch in time, the screen goes dark
and then you just die because you don't know where anything
is. So they assume that you fell
into a trap or something like so you have to worry about the dark
kills you, the dark kills you. What are you doing, Jesse?
Mine is. You mentioned environmental.
Mine is kind of environmental. It is not just one game, it is
an entire series, and that series is actually ATV show now.
It is the Fallout series from Fallout 1 all the way to Fallout
76 and the TV show to the whole series.
You face so many villains, so many bad guys, but really the
big bad of the whole entire thing is the world around.
So the big question I always, you know, thinking about Fallout
and and doing this podcast is would any of these villains
actually be villains without the world around them?
The world itself, the post apocalypse, the nuclear world
itself created them because I mean some of them they mutated
like I'm. I'm following.
Death Clause, Some of them are created because they're trying
to survive. So Fallout 1 and Fallout 1,
Fallout 2 and Tactics. I didn't really play a whole
lot, but the Master is a iconic villain.
The whole the whole game. He was originally a guy called
Richard Gray. He's just an ordinary guy.
And after being exposed to something called forced
evolutionary virus, the wasteland literally warped him
into the creature that he became.
And it kind of warped him into something that that was
believed. The only way that humanity would
survive was to be this. And it wasn't like a cartoonish
evil. It was a twisted survival
strategy, like this is the only way humans are going to survive.
This is what I have to become. And in Fallout 2, you have the
Enclave, which from Fallout 2 all the way on, I think they're
in 76 a bit. But on paper, like you've
looking at lore, there were there were the remnants of the
US government, but in practice they become tyrants because they
believe the wasteland was contaminated beyond saving.
And only they were pure enough to rebuild civilization.
So anyway, it's now Dan Clave has to die.
Perfect. So they were shaped not by
survival, but by paranoia, by scarcity and fear of dying
themselves. And then you get into Fallout 3.
I'm skipping Tactics and Brotherhood, stealing all that
stuff. You have characters like Colonel
Autumn and even the Raiders themselves that you encounter.
They weren't born evil. The Raiders were not born evil.
So I'm a certain of them probably were, but most of them
weren't. They're scavengers.
They're victims of the wasteland themselves.
They're trying to get food, they're trying to get water.
They're trying to get, you know, just survive.
And they have to turn to violence to survive.
So you haven't played three, but Megaton is as soon as you walk
out of their vault, Megaton is the first civilization you get
to, and they call it Megaton because in the center of Megaton
is an undetonated nuclear bomb. What?
The whole city is built around the whole bomb.
Why would they do that? It's amazing story.
So and you, you as you kind of go and you get the main Megaton
quest line and you go to 10 Penny and thing called 10
Penny's tower and he wants you to detonate the bomb and get rid
of Megaton. And then obviously you have
people inside that don't want you to do that.
So you have this whole morality thing, you know, do you detonate
the bomb or do you let them live?
And it kind of is built around your skills.
Like if you have the skill to your science skills high enough,
you can disarm the bomb as long as you try to disarm the bomb
and it blows up. Or you can set.
You can set a trap and charge. Go back to Tenpenny Tower and
watch the whole city blow up with with Mr. Tenpenny.
Wow. I've done both and then we get
to Fallout 3. Well, Fallout New Vegas is kind
of completely separate because it was made by a different
company. It was made by Obsidian, believe
it or not, which is the same people that did have vowed, but
it's it's very similar in in the stories, but I'm going to skip
to Fallout 4 because you have what in that is called the
institute. They were kind of robots in a
way that they're like, since they call them since so
synthetic humans. And they didn't hide underground
because they were just naturally villainous.
They hid because the world above them was too far gone.
Like they, they saw that humanity was gone and they
wanted to just hide and their experiments in Sith creation,
synth creations. As you play the game, the people
you're, you're, you're seeing like you, you go to Diamond City
and everybody is terrified of sense because people, they think
people are getting kidnapped and turn into sentence like people,
people like disappear and they come back and say they're like a
robot. They're different.
Wow. You can't tell because of the
human. So people are terrified of them,
but that was their way of trying to preserve humanity because
they they thought it was already ended.
So whether you see them as villains or saviors, it's how
you interpret their response to the environment.
And then you get a 76, which, you know, I it's not really your
traditional Fallout mainland like game because it's a MMO,
but you don't have a traditional villain at first.
You you face environmental threats like the scorch plague
because like people are turned into these zombie like things
because of a plague. They're not evil.
They're normal people that are victims of radiation, mutation
and disease. The world and the villains in
the game were just other survivals, survivors who just
had misfortune and they're trying to survive themselves.
So the whole series from start to finish and it's not finished
yet, but the whole series is doesn't give you someone to
hate. It gives you kind of understand
all the villains from my perspective, because they're all
trying to survive and they're all trying to do what they think
is best to survive. So you have the Enclave, you
have the Master, the Raiders Institute, all of a Mr. House
from, from Fallout New Vegas. They're all trying to do what
they think they need to do to survive.
And it's it just creates such a good world.
And the whole central theme, in my opinion, of Fallout
throughout the whole thing is survival demands cruelty.
Sometimes in in New Vegas and Mr. House, we still have Kizar,
you know, that his whole thing, he reverts back to tribal, just
pure violence to survive. You know, the strongest survive.
So I'm going to be the strongest and I'm going to kill anybody
else to prove that I'm the strongest.
And that's the whole lesson in my opinion that Fallout teaches
is that in a world destroyed by war, morality doesn't die
overnight. It's mutated, it's twisted, it's
adapted, just like everything else in the world.
That's really interesting because you know, we talked
about in our, our game narrative design episode, the world of the
Last of Us, right? And it's very similar.
You know, these post apocalyptic worlds bring out the best and
worst in people and it's it's, it's out of necessity, right?
It's out of necessity to survival, to survival to survive
in this world. And evil finds different forms
in a post apocalyptic world, these people.
In fallout are actual people trying to survive to protect
their family and some are actual mutated people that have no
other thing to do. Because I can't help it.
That's right, the mutations I have.
That's right. So was it more fun, scarier, or
less personal than like this character driven villain?
To me, I thought it was in a way scarier because I thought it was
more realistic. I can totally see that
happening. I can see shades of that
happening right now. And it's like if you know, I
always thought like, because Fallout 3 is like Washington DC,
Fallout 4 is Boston, and obviously New Vegas is Las
Vegas. I like to a tee, I thought New
Vegas was exactly what would happen to Las Vegas if something
like nuclear bombs went off like it to AT and just like walking
in three like walking. This is why I hope they remake
follow three. First is like walking through
the capital wasteland is what they call it.
Seeing the monuments, seeing like the Washington Monument,
seeing everything. It's like man, it's just in
ruin. And then like Raiders come out
of it or so you see someone like hiding in.
It's just it just to me, it was incredibly realistic.
It's cool because in that sense, it doesn't matter what the
monument represented anymore. Nope, it's just this is where
I'm. Represents now, yeah.
And then like the whole, like the other central theme is like
a whole like hump for technology.
Sure. I get an advantage on this other
tribe that's also trying to get an advantage.
Like in Fallout New Vegas, there's the battle for the
Hoover Dam for electricity. Yeah.
You know, it's some basic things like that.
It's, it's very realistic to me and it's very, very scary
because 100% could and probably will happen eventually.
That's, that's insane. I can feel it as you're talking
about it, you know, it's like, God, I hope this doesn't happen
in real life. Yeah, that's one thing like the
the TV show, it didn't really get into like a big city.
It was more like outskirts. But now in fault like the season
2 is going to get to New Vegas. So I'm very interested to see
how they how they do new. Vegas.
That'll be really cool. All right, it's time for trivia.
The the the Q trivia theme music.
No, I don't have trivia theme music.
Sorry. I'm going to go 1st.
And mine is villain themed for you, Jesse.
So this is this is pretty fun. I think it's a softball and God
knows we say this every time, but this one's in your
wheelhouse. And we just talked about this
villain. So we're piggybacking this in
Ocarina of Time. I know you haven't played that
one in a while. There we go.
I, I knew we were going to say that Ganondorf is the king of
what desert tribe? Gorodo.
Yes, the Garudo. The Garudo.
Garudo. Yeah, that's what it is.
So fun fact, Ocarina of Time was actually the first Zelda game to
introduce the Garudo as it was, and their big lore hook is that
only one male is born every 100 years.
And that unlucky guy in Ocarina of Time just happened to be
Ganondorf. So before that all the Zelda
games that predated it. You don't know the story of
Ganondorf. You don't know his motives other
than bad guy Triforce power trying to rule the the Hyrule.
And in Ocarina, they expanded on that and they they introduced
the tribe. They introduced the Garudo as a
people, all the women. By the way, Grudo Valley, that
music from Ocarina of Time, one of the all time bangers of video
game music. Ganondorf was that one male king
of thieves. Yeah.
So good. Good snag there, Jesse.
That was really good. So Garudo is in Breath of the
Wild and they're in Here's the Kingdom.
So that's why I knew it, because it's mentioned in that.
Yes, that's why I was comfortable giving you that one
because I was like, even if he hasn't played Ocarina, I know
the lore dump is there in the in the the two latest ones.
So this one is also a villain for mine and is also something
that you've played and is also in your warehouse and I think it
is a giant softball. Which Marvel villain is the
final boss in Spider Man? Miles Morales.
My God, it's been so long since I played.
That game, like what I said with Ocarina.
Miles Morales, not Spider Man 2. Not one.
Not 2 Miles Morales. Holy crap is it shocker.
No, no, that's not my answer. Do you want?
It's his friend, or is not. The friend's name like the real
name, not the villain name. No, I'm not going to get this
one, Jesse. It's the it's the girl, right?
It is the girl. What's her name?
She's not the Prowler. Nope, that's his uncle.
I don't remember her name. So her real name is Finn Mason
and her villain name is The Tinkerer.
The tinkerer, man, I was never going to get that.
You knew who it was, you just didn't know her official name.
I do because like. I would give it to you.
They build the tension up over the game so well, right?
Like she's coming to dinner at Miles's house and they're
hanging out and and then it's like, Oh no, she's got her own
agenda. Man thought like they were
getting romantic involved like they're that hinted, but yeah.
That game was really well done. All those new Spider man ones
are I'm I'm looking very forward to The Wolverine game.
You, he is my favorite all time, even more than Geralt.
Hero so. The Wolverine game is going to
be so quick. Quick aside, how does a
developer create a Wolverine game for players to play that's
still challenging when the character is virtually
unkillable? Yeah, I don't know.
Because I mean. Like, he, he, I mean, I guess if
you cut his head off or like in Logan, just shove a giant tree
through him. Yeah.
OK, so the, The Wolverine has to just age out in the video game
and his healing powers are diminished over 100 couple 100
years. OK, great.
You know? But it's that's always the
conundrum when when making a Wolverine game, it's like, well,
if we're going to stick close to Canon, it's like Logan's near
unkillable. And I'm interested too because
it's the same people that made a spider man.
Yep. And the movement and spider man
is a central thing. I think him swinging through New
York City, well, I don't know what they're going to do with.
Logan, it looks like they have him like adamantium wall
crawling up buildings. Oh, is there a gameplay for it?
I think there's some gameplay footage out there.
Off the look I've I've kind of been purposely not looking
because I I feel like I'm going to get disappointed.
I think that's fair. I think I'm.
Excited for that one. So segment 4, this one I came up
with directly. I didn't get any help, but I
thought this would be a fun one to go over because there are
Comic Relief villains in games and they're important for game
structure. So who are your favorite Comic
Relief villains? But mine, I, I, I know guys, I'm
predictable. It's a Final Fantasy game.
Who saw that coming? Nobody.
It's Final Fantasy 8 though in particular, and it's Biggs and
Wedge. Biggs and Wedge make their first
appearance in Final Fantasy 6 at the very beginning and they're
basically obliterated in the first scenes, so OK, they're
there. Fun fact, Bigs and Wedge and
Final Fantasy were named for Bigs and Wedge from Star Wars,
Luke's friends. Yeah.
They were, they were named for them.
So Bigs and Wedge and Final Fantasy 8 as the centerpiece.
The gag villains are a couple of Galbadian soldiers.
Who's Galbadia? What does that mean?
It's just a faction of soldiers and they're running gag
characters and and each time they reappear, their ranks have
been demoted. So each time you run into them,
you beat them and then they're punished for it and they're mad.
And the funny part with that is like the battles are always low
stakes. They're they're not hard
battles. It just makes their constant
frustration even funnier because they are so underpowered going
into this. They just, they are just the
butt of all of these jokes here. And it's like, you guys caused
our demotion. We're going to thrash you.
And they're like weaker than the first time you fought them.
And the humor comes from the player being the reason for
their downfall, not their incompetence, right?
It's my fault that Biggs and Wedge got demoted because I had
to defeat them. And they're like these these
perfect mini boss bad guys that it makes you smile.
You see them because they they have distinct coloring.
One of them's wearing a blue suit and others wearing a red.
One of them's kind of more jacked, the others kind of thin
and wiry. And it's just, it's really fun.
And and and you see them pop up and you're like, oh Jesus, these
guys again. What is going to happen now?
And like, it's great for early in the game, like they're so
weak. And in in Final Fantasy 8, they
had the draw system, which has met with a lot of debate from
gamers and whether they like the draw system or not.
To explain the draw system to you, Jesse.
So all magic in that game is drawn.
What the hell does that? Enemies on the screen, you have
to literally select a draw command and you suck the magic
out of them. Yeah.
Yeah, not in draw like for the pencil, like right.
Draw it out. Yeah, yeah.
And you stock those spells and it's like RNG related based on,
I think one of your stats for how many spells you stock.
So if an enemy contains a Thunder spell and you draw from
them, you may draw 3 or 4 Thunder spells.
Now their pool is unlimited. So with Biggs and Wedge, they're
so weak and one of them has a cure spell that you can just
draw and cast immediately. You just drain them, fill up
your draw spots, and then you continue with the boss fight.
And that's a strategy. And and that's a strategy for
some other boss fights, but it's in particular fun with them
because they keep talking smack the whole time.
And every time they pop up, it's like, it's like the Leo DiCaprio
meme that you see the. Yeah.
Yeah, I was holding a beer. Yeah.
Yeah, every time you see them, it's like, Oh my God, they're
back. And then they appear in other
games. So Biggs and Wedge again,
obliterated very early on in Final Fantasy 6 and Final
Fantasy 7. They're Avalanche members,
they're good guys, They're on your team.
They're let's not count Remake because for some reason Remake
wants to keep them alive. In Final Fantasy 7 originally,
they don't make it. In Final Fantasy 8, they're the
Galbadian officers, Comic Relief recurring villains.
In Final Fantasy 9, they're airship engineers.
In Lindblom, which is one of the main cities.
Final Fantasy 10, they're Blitzball playing crusaders.
You can recruit them to your team in Blitzball.
In Final Fantasy 10 too, same thing.
They're Blitzball League staff now in Final Fantasy 13, they're
there. So again, you get the there they
are. It's almost like the Sid thing
in all the Final Fantasy games. In Final Fantasy 14, the MMO,
they're engineers working for Sid.
So there's like compounded stuff there.
And in 15 they're members of the Lucian army during certain
missions. So they they just, they're
always there. They're eternal In Final Fantasy
8, they're the butt of a joke. It's so funny running into them.
They have fun dialogue, no real recourse in in playing against
them, fighting them. It's easy fights and it's just
funny. And if I ever make a video game,
I'm going to make villains just like them because it's
hysterical. They're going to be the
recurring easy villain that gets demoted every single time you
beat them. And quick shout out to Star Wars
the Rick the door technician. If you ever saw the the YouTube
shorts on Rick the door technician.
So you're playing the the newer Star Wars games?
What the heck were they called? Why can't I think of it?
Jedi survivor or whatever. Yeah, Jedi Survivor.
And thank you. I didn't have to Google it.
We just jesseed it. And you get to this area and and
this guy comes running at you screaming and a boss bar pops up
and everything. He's running at you and it says
Rick, the door technician. You're like, what?
And you swing at him with a light Saber and you one shot him
the whole health bar. I started playing one of those
games. I haven't gotten that far I
guess. The whole health bar goes and
it's hysterical. You one shot him and you're
like, what? And that's when you remember the
developers have free will to do whatever they want.
Yes they do. So that's a really, really funny
one. That reminds me of I can't
remember his name in the Witcher 3 but he's like this knight
that's trying to get like. Oh my God, that you have to
fight five times, Yeah. And he keeps coming back and he
loses every time. And he's just running away like
kids to remind me. Of and you have the actual
option to kill him. Yes, you do.
I never do. I don't either because he's just
a doofus. I never do.
And that was in a Blood and Wine.
Yeah, I think. Right.
Yeah. And why these villains work is
because comedic villains always keep the tone like light without
breaking immersion. They always become beloved
touchstones for players where you're like there's pigs and
wedge. I love it.
Yep. So I have two.
First one is it's from a game series.
I haven't really talked. I don't think to you about it
all. And that's it's not just from
the game series, but I'm talking about the Joker from the Batman
Arkham series. So we're talking like an actual
clown. So he is like I, I thought like
you have what's his face as the lead singer there of 30 Seconds
To Mars that he was. A Jared Leto.
Jared Leto. He, I think he tried to be this
in some of those like Suicide Squad movies, but I don't think
he hit on it. But it's dark comedy at its
finest in the Arkham series because he's absolutely
terrifying. But he is so funny.
He's constantly cracking jokes. He's constantly taunting you
because you're you play as Batman and he's just making
light of horrific things that he's doing.
Like it's like, oh, look what I just did.
I just move this guy up. So fun fact.
Slapstick, it's like twisted, it's sadistic.
It's it's very absurd. Do you know who voices Joker in
those games? Mark Hamill.
Yes. So that's.
That's one of my points is, is the voice, but it's it's with
him. It's so unpredictable.
Like you don't, you don't know if you should laugh or just be
completely horrified about what he's doing.
Because 11 moment he could be joking about Batman and how he's
brooding and blah, blah, blah, and the next he's murdering a
whole bunch of people. So it's comedy and menace.
And the voice acting is really what gets it because he does it.
He does the voice in the cartoons too, yes.
So he leans into the comedy just enough.
So even him being cruel, he still gets a laugh and it's
entertaining and it's such an it's like a whole narrative
function with him. It's makes him bigger than life
and bigger than what he really is.
He's almost mythic like you said before.
And even when he's dying or when he's a hallucination, he's still
delivering 1 liners and it's always stuck in your head.
And then my second one hold on A. 2nd So when I said the
villains that just don't die that you can't kill the villains
like killing off Venom. This is why you should never
kill off the Joker because he is the perfect foil to Batman.
He drives Batman bonkers. He's psychotic, he's hysterical.
You don't know if you're laughing, you don't know if
you're cringing, you don't know what's going on.
Why? Why would anybody ever kill off
a villain like that in a movie series, in a comic series or
anything else when you have golden opportunities for the
Joker to do Joker things? Like, that's why villains like
Joker are both comedic and the never die ones.
You know, we could throw it all the way back to there.
Joker's a perfect never die villain.
I almost named it off at the beginning when I was talking
about things. I was like, hey, no, no, I know
what Jesse's going to talk about later.
And my second one is, is kind of along the lines of like, oh, you
beat them when they come back, you beat them to come back.
And it's Team Rocket from the Pokémon games and the card game
that and the cartoons. And Jesse is is the girl.
I'm not to be mistaken with me. And James and Meowth, they're
you know, they're Pokémon. They are kind of the opposite of
the choker. They're never really threatening
to you in any real match like any of your way.
They're just bumbling idiots with schemes that are just
doomed from the start. And their whole comic, comic
comedic part isn't failing because they're always failing
and everything's botched, you know, from stealing Pikachu or
any other rare Pokémon they're always trying to do.
And they always end in some explosion or a pun or some
gadget that malfunctions. And it's always predictable.
That's always a punch line. And it's it's very sometimes
self aware because sometimes they break the false wall by
cracking jokes about the Pokémon world or exaggerating their evil
intentions. And just like with the Joker,
it's a narrative function. You know, it lightens the tone
of somewhat sometimes very serious games because it's the
younger players are playing it and they never really feel
overwhelmed by the villain because they know it's they're
like they're going to beat them and they're just they're kind of
just to be there. And unlike Joker, who totally
destabilize Batman with humor, Team Rocket kind of reassures
the player that it's fun, it's not grim, and they're gonna win.
So. Team Rocket's an interesting
one, right? Because Jesse and James and
Meowth are very much an anime and manga thing, right?
But we do get a video game time because in Pokémon Yellow,
right, Jesse there in that one explicitly inserted into that
one. That was the word I was looking
for. So while the slapstick and
everything is much more from the anime and everything, Team
Rocket is very much alive in the Pokémon games in that sense.
And it's not just Giovanni the the mastermind behind everything
with his Persian, not a Meowth, which is a point of contention
by Meowth in the series. Yeah, they're they're a fun one.
And and what? What's their catch phrase?
Team Rocket flies again. No rides again is.
Blasting off again. Blasting off.
Blasting off again. That's what I.
Think yeah, and that's their crack as they're getting blasted
into the sky through a Pikachu Thunder shock or one of their
gadgets exploding or something else.
It's the best fun fact about me outside of like Aerial.
Jesse from Team Rocket was one of my my first anime crushes for
sure. I had the Hotspur.
There's a weird redhead theme there too which is odd.
I guess I like redhead animated characters or something.
Of redhead, mine from the earliest that I can think of was
the Wendy's chick. I love it.
Yeah, that's embarrassing. Listen, we're old, OK?
Very old. So do you think their humor adds
like charm or does it undercut the stakes for?
You the 2 ones that I mentioned, I think it adds to it like it is
completely like Team Rocket is not really required for the
story, but it makes it light hearted and it makes it doesn't
makes you not take it seriously. Whereas without the Joker, I
don't think there's I mean, there's other villains like Bane
and the Riddler or whatever, but he it's just he is the Yang to
Batman's Yang. Yeah, he's the.
Foil, right? He's the one that gets under
Batman's skin more than any other villain, without question.
Even even when it like he, you know you're going to beat him
and you know he's he's not going to succeed.
But it's the unpredictability of it.
Like you don't know what he's going to do next.
You know when he's going to pop up, you don't know what he's
going to do. And it just makes, to me, it
makes it more fun. It really does.
I agree. All right, last segment, the
scary villains. So I went horror tropes here and
I went PlayStation 1 horror. So long time ago.
Yeah, my first one is a callback to 1998.
I was 16 years old in a little game from Square before they
were Square Enix came out called Parasite Eve.
And boy, was that a good game based on a novel.
I'm not sure if it was the same, same name or not.
It's a Japanese novel. Parasite Eve is a story about
mitochondria. And you're going, wait a minute,
wait a minute, Bob, are we going like, back into biology class
from high school? The mitochondria, you know, it's
the powerhouse of the cell. It helps oxygenation and stuff
so parasite it. Looks very familiar, I think I
might have played that. It's it was awesome.
Awesome. So the games kind of campy
overall because you're bouncing back and forth to different
areas in New York City and everything, but the cutscenes,
the body horror still hold up. And like Eve, is this, this,
this primordial villain, right? It's, it's, it's evolved
mitochondria and it's, it's the next evolution of human beings.
And it's like a terrifying next evolution of humanity because
she has control over regular people's mitochondria.
So she has this immense power. Like one of the opening scenes
of the the the game is when it's this character's power awakens
and she's an opera singer and people in the audience just
spontaneously start combusting. She just triggered all of their
stuff to to flare up all their mitochondria to fire at the same
time, and they just spontaneously combust.
There's another scene in in the Central Park Zoo where she shows
up at a performance and, and the audience members turn into a
ball of goo, you know, and just, you know, the, the cutscene,
it's like, you know, the guy's eye turns into Jelly and then
it, it rolls down and it, this is all PlayStation 1 graphics.
So, yeah. But like, that's terrifying even
for a 16 year old. You're like, what in the world
is going on? And even as a player, you're
like, again, this is another theme here.
How am I going to beat her? Like, first of all, your
character's immune. She's got some kind of a
evolutionary edge here against Eve.
Mutation or something? And she's able to survive this.
Turns out, you find out that she was also experimented on like
Eve was experimented on, just in a different way.
So she again, the yin to the Yang, as you'd say, and you go
through all of New York City and everything and she's Eve's main
goal is to produce an offspring. And it's a very mature audiences
game because like she raids a sperm bank to to find, you know,
the right, the right donor for herself to get pregnant.
She does, she succeeds, she has a child.
The child is the final boss and it's just holy crap that the
game just it starts at an 11 and it stays there as far as like
the horror, if you will. And of course, my second one,
it's just a call back to the Resident Evil series in general,
but in particular the original game still is one of the best
for me. I remember getting the Resident
Evil Director's cut. Hold on a second, sorry, you
don't need to hear cold sounds from my sinuses.
Director's Cut. And that game was so cool
because the way they use the mansion, right?
You get that claustrophobic nature of traversing the
hallways. You have the silence because
there's not a ton of music in that game.
The tension, the jump scares, the zombies just appearing
around corners. And then there's the that
hallway where the dogs jump through the windows at you.
I remember that. Man, that that was just iconic
and and the mansion itself, just fully immersive dread.
Then Resident Evil 4 comes around.
By the way, Parasite, even Resident Evil 2 released the
same year. Wow.
Resident Evil 4 comes around, which is obviously the best game
objectively. I don't want to hear it.
And that stands out as a favor for me because it took that
formula and amplified it, the pacing, the enemies, the
atmosphere, everything about that game, the lust Plagas, the,
the parasite things and and they, you know, they turn the
zombies into something a little bit more than than just lack of
agency that they were controlling things.
They were hive mind. It was really well done and and
Resident Evil 4 stands out to me.
And and again, like we've described in other other
podcasts, the chainsaw guys and the gore when they get you and
everything like that is horror to the letter.
And and it was really, really well done and why these games
endure, why Resident Evil 1 still hits for me is they hit me
at the right age when that fear kind of sticks.
You know, Resident Evil 1, I was probably 15.
You know, they're not just monsters.
They create this immersion in these games.
There's so few games had from before.
It's like Mega Man, you're just traversing side scroller.
Metroidvania games, traversing side scroller with Resident
Evil, you're there. You are in that mansion.
With your characters 3D. It was just, man, that was it.
That was pinnacle horror gaming for me, scary.
And I know you're taking a different approach to scary, so
why don't you hit us? And ironically.
You talk about Resident Evil. Resident Evil 9 was announced
today Yeah, that the Nintendo Direct so I also have two and
the first one is probably not what you would imagine or
describe as scary, but it's the guardians from Zelda Breath of
the Wild, so you probably didn't encounter them because.
I don't think you really got. I did.
I got absolutely murked. Yep.
So it's like the first time like and you'll never for even like.
Granted, you replay it, you know what to expect, but the first
time you come across a guardian and the music starts and the
targeting noise starts. And that sound haunts me.
The laser. Like what is that?
And then boom, you're. Literally, you're absolutely
just obliterated. And it scares absolutely crap
out of you too. It's like you get anxiety when
you see an ancient thing in the ground.
Like it's not gonna pop out is it's gonna twist around and look
at me. And like the music for me, the
music and the sound effects of it are what really drive it.
Because you could be running along on your horse or walking
along and then you suddenly you start hearing it.
Like where is it? Where is it?
And a lot of times, by the time
it targets you and you see the red dot on you, it's too late.
Really. It's too late because you can't
run anywhere and you can't get behind anything.
You're gone. And as the game goes along, you
go against different type of guardians.
You have some that fly, you have some that actually are on spider
legs that walk around. You have some that are just
buried in the ground that their head just flips around and flips
that. Yeah, that's what I remember.
They get harder and harder and actual like defeating him, like
the actual battle itself before you get like over levelled and
you know, get all like the end game stuff.
It's incredibly, incredibly hard to beat them.
Yeah, I remember like the first one I encountered.
I was like, I have to beat this thing, don't I?
So like, and when you get going, like you'll get to the point
where you have like a metal shield and you can if you time
it exact, you can deflect it and it will go back and hit them.
And or if you have a hiling and shield, you can just block it
and it'll just kind of reflect off.
But it's even to the end, like even when you're at the end of
the game, about to go against the final like incarnation of
Gandorf, it's still stress inducing to to come across one
because you don't know if you mistime it, you're gone.
Absolutely. So part environmental, part
villain, scary, part little bit of everything.
Those things are eternal. Yeah.
Then I, I can't remember. I haven't played tears and I
kicked them in a long time. That's my next to the play.
I think they're on that too. And then my second one is, and I
always go back to The Witcher 3, another villain in The Witcher
3, but it's the Crohn's of Crook back fog.
So this is the rest that I was going to come back to.
So they are absolutely terrifying because they are kind
of representative of the of like Slavic folklore witches.
And like you have one that's blind with a cloth kind of sewn
over her eyes, if one that has a sack over her head and one that
is just like this post grotesque, like big fat thing.
And it's not just their looks that's really chilling.
It's how they control people. And if you if, if you remember,
they manipulate children, they prey on the vulnerable and they
demand incredibly gruesome things.
Ears. Yep.
And they kind of blur the lines between protectors and predators
because they're like, we can protect you if you do this.
If you don't do this, then you're going to incur the wrath.
And it makes the villagers kind of worship them as like a deity,
really. And the first time you meet them
is through the tapestry, like the.
Part of the Bloody Baron quest, mind you.
It is. And if you remember how you see
them and sometimes like shown, yeah, these three naked
beautiful women and you're like, I as soon as I saw it, I'm like,
no, no, no, there's something wrong.
There's something wrong. This isn't right and it only
like it kind of just unravels into this grotesque reality of
what they are as you go along. And it kind of is like a fairy
tale, kind of like of a Hansel and Gretel to me.
But it's something it just goes horribly wrong.
And I love the whole storyline of them, how you like you have
to fight them. You could like them live.
I think there's one where you can kill them and like you can
kind of. Choose one escapes.
Yeah, 1 gets away, but they kind of help Siri in a way too.
So it's like kind of morally Gray, but definitely more
villain than anything in this one.
They're so interesting in that, in that world, right, because
they're kind of like always have been in that area.
That's it's not like one of those things where they just
showed up 10 years ago and. They've always been.
There, they've like always been there, and that's just been the
way of life for any humans around them.
It's the the Crohn's. And yeah, we, we don't want to
piss them off. And they know that they're just,
they don't have any good motives, right?
Like in the saving of Siri, it's because she had elder blood and.
They had only reason. Tasted elder blood in a long
time, you know, so like. But you're like and you're like
strangely attracted to them because how they depict
themselves when they're on their monster form.
Yep. So it's like.
You can understand how some poor villager could get lured in, you
know. Yeah, they, they also remind me
of the Greek Fates, like the, the ones that weave the threads
and everything, because there's, there's three of them.
There's Clotho, A lacacus and Atropos.
And it really reminds me of them too, because it's, it's kind of
that dynamic as I'm getting a tickle of my throat here.
This is what I get for podcasting while I'm sick.
It's kind of like the same dynamic, right?
They they control the fates of of that area and also like the
nightmare quest, like the tree thing, Yep, that that was like a
fourth one or something at some point and they vanished.
Yeah, wasn't. Didn't you turn out to be a
werewolf or something? No, that was just guarding it.
Right, that was guarding it. Yeah, I knew there was a
werewolf involved. There is a werewolf outside the
tree. But yeah, that story, it's just,
and again, Witcher 3, the creepy factor with those guys, so
awesome. Yeah, I'm I'm going to download
it on the switch to when I'm done here.
Actually this makes me want to replay it too.
So do you think modern games pull it off as well?
Like or are modern game villains better?
Or is it the writing like each era unique?
Like how? How do you feel about modern
villains compared to the old school 8 bit, 16 bit, But you
know what I mean? Like is there's a difference.
There's a. There's a big difference there's
and I think the big difference is the modern ones have the
graphics and have the technology to really make anything
possible. Yeah, whereas like you have the
8 bit stuff and even the PS1, like you're limited to what
villains and what the horror could look like.
Now you're not limited to anything.
Make it whatever you want. Like have you played any of the
Dead Space games? No, but I don't think I want.
To those are freaking terrifying and it's like you couldn't do
that. You couldn't pull that off in 8
bit error because the little the creatures and the aliens, they
wouldn't look like that, right? If you wouldn't get scared of
them right now, you can make it look like whatever you want and
they're gonna look freaking terrifying because you can make
them look like whatever. You want, I've seen clips of
that game and it's at Nope, that's not for me.
Like even like the the Alien game where you're like hiding
from the alien and it knows where you are.
Direction is that when you. Like the microphone on your
controllers active and if you make it like, Nope, no thanks.
I mean, horror games have a whole new feel to them now.
And it's it's really incredible. And you can't do that, like you
said in the old games, but you can write a really good villain.
You can still write a really good villain.
And that that's what stuck with me from the old games.
So villains stick with us for different reasons, right?
Some never die and become mythic.
Some burn bright and unforgettable as our one and
done's. Some are forces of nature more
world than character, The Fallout Lavos.
Some make us laugh, Team Rocket, the Joker makes us laugh and
cringe, and some some scared us so bad as kids we remember
decades later. Like Jesse said, I don't
remember playing that game, but I remember that scene with the
dogs jumping through the windows of Resident Evil.
That scene is iconic. So what makes a villain
unforgettable isn't just how powerful they are, not their
strength levels. It's how they land with us as
players. And just like heroes, they
become part of our gaming memories.
My tattoos. I've shown off half of our
villains in tattoos tonight. They've clearly made an impact
on me and the stories that we still share years later.
So we've talked about some villains tonight that we can't
forget. Now it's your turn, listeners.
Who's the villain that's stuck with you and why?
Let us know in the comments. DM me, I don't care.
Let me know who your favorite villains are and why.
Why did they stick with you? And as always, Jesse, you have
any words of wisdom for us tonight?
I do, and I wrote this down again because I'm getting old.
I can't remember what I wanted. To do in a row.
At the end of the day, villains and video games remind us of why
we play in the 1st place. They challenge us, they
frustrate us, and sometimes even make us feel something deeper
than victory. The best villains aren't just
obstacles, they're the reason the story matters.
Without them, heroes are just people wandering around.
And with them we get. We get legends.
I love that. I love that.
Well, thanks for listening tonight, everyone.
Be awesome out there. We'll see you next time.