Video games have come a long way in creating characters that players can truly get attached to beyond just participating in the adventures unfolding before them. With the myriad of ways a story can be told through the media of video games today, good characters are still the most important factor.
Sometimes games severely miss the mark though. And over the last decade, there have been some really bad characters. Whether they’re badly written, poorly portrayed or poorly implemented into their respective universe. Here are the 10 worst, new characters of the decade in gaming. Note that reboot characters are, unfortunately, excluded. They technically aren’t new, just radically different butcherings of classic characters.
10 10. Infinite (Sonic Forces, 2017)
It seems like Sega and Sonic Team just can’t get enough of their edgy characters. Infinite has got to be one of the worst villains to be introduced to the mainline series of Sonic games. Aside from his pitiful backstory of being a mercenary and then throwing a temper tantrum after losing to Shadow, Infinite underperforms for a villain of this magnitude.
His powers are confusing at best and his threat-level to the player is minimal and conveyed very poorly. His awful dialogue and overflowing amounts of edge don’t help. It’s like the writers wanted to desperately make another Shadow clone and left out everything that made Shadow interesting to fans in the first place when he was introduced in Adventure 2.
9 9. Mathias (Tomb Raider, 2013)
Since having the new Lara on this list is a no-go, we’ll have to settle for the main antagonist of the same game. While Mathias isn’t strictly characterized badly, he’s got a bad case of ‘dumb villain’ syndrome.
Throughout the story of Tomb Raider, any time Mathias has the upper hand, he squanders it for no reason. When he gets his hands on Sam, whom he believes is his key to getting off the island after heaven knows how long, he’d rather waste time instead of getting the ritual started immediately. When he gets Lara in a helpless state with a bunch of his goons around, instead of just killing her, he settles with locking her up, allowing her to easily break out and continue to screw his plans over.
8 8. Iden Versio (Star Wars Battlefront II, 2017)
Possibly the saddest character on this list, Iden Versio had a lot of potential, but she was largely squandered by a lack of focused execution. Being the main playable character in a Star Wars game where her perspective comes through the eyes of an Imperial foot soldier, it was a great opportunity to explore the mindset of a stormtrooper and how they see the empire as well as the rebels they’re fighting against.
But no. Just like Finn in the movies, Iden becomes one of the good guys with little to no insight into the stormtrooper mindset or any real struggle with this shift in alliances. On top of that, she’s only marginally more interesting than Rey herself.
7 7. Jameson Locke (Halo 5: Guardians, 2015)
Halo 5’s characters are something of a mixed bag. Some people are apathetic toward them, some like them and others hate them. Every character in Fireteam Osiris has a case for this spot, but the biggest offender has got to be Locke.
Locke just isn’t a character who was developed very well in Halo 5, especially not for a character who’s supposed to be the series’ new protagonist. Or at least that’s what they were trying to go for? The execution of this is sloppy at best, when considering Halo 5’s mountainous amounts of expositional dialogue. Now, Master Chief wasn’t exactly all that developed when he debuted in Halo either, but he had the luxury of better characters to play off of, memorable one-liners and a well-established air of mystery. Locke, unfortunately, received none of those benefits.
6 6. Aiden Pearce (Watch Dogs, 2014)
Good old Watch Dogs. Possibly one of Ubisoft’s most divisive titles on release. Everyone is pretty much aware of the graphical discrepancies, but the game’s main character, Aiden Pearce, probably stands out the most for all the wrong reasons. Most find Aiden to be a pretty bland character and nothing more than an exposition machine, constantly spewing out information to the player.
Aiden’s worse quality, though, has got to be how he always seems to artificially extend the game’s plot with dumb decisions. The biggest being when he blatantly turns down a partnership with Damien, even though it’d be mutually beneficial, and then gets his sister kidnapped because of it.
5 5. Mama Murphy (Fallout 4, 2015)
Fallout 4 has no shortage of awful characters. From Preston Garvey to Marcy Long to even the player character themselves. While many of them could fill this spot for how badly written and annoying they are for all the wrong reasons, Mama Murphy takes the cake for how much of a lazy character she is.
This doesn’t mean she’s a character who’s lazy. Well, technically, she IS a character who’s really lazy, but this more means how lazily she’s implemented into the Fallout universe. So, Mama Murphy is supposed to be a psyker, which is someone who possesses paranormal powers, except she needs drugs to retain her powers. With your immersion thoroughly broken, this makes Mama Murphy less of a ‘character’ and more of a tool for the writer to tell the player to do stuff.
4 4. D’Vorah (Mortal Kombat X, 2015)
Mortal Kombat’s resident bug lady was somewhat unceremoniously shoved into players’ faces in Mortal Kombat X. She’s played off as some important character who was retconned into events in Mortal Kombat going back as far as Mortal Kombat 2.
Now, the MK series is no stranger when it comes to retcons like this, but D’Vorah’s just feels so horribly cobbled together in an attempt to justify killing veteran characters like Mileena and Baraka and taking part in key events surrounding important items. Nothing she accomplished feels right, regardless of her being a villain. She just leaves a foul taste in your mouth with the way she’s inserted into the universe.
3 3. Kronika (Mortal Kombat 11, 2019)
Staying with MK’s exceptionally screwy timeline, let’s talk about Kronika, the apparent, real big baddie of the entire MK series. Like Mathias, Kronika also suffers from ‘dumb villain’ syndrome, but way worse. You could make a near-endless list on Kronika’s problems, but we’ll keep things brief here.
Her character selection when bringing people from the past to serve in her army is incredibly questionable and her involvement in the entire story seems unneeded. Her son’s head gets chopped off, she gets mad about it and feels like she needs to fix the entire timeline over it. Ostensibly, if she was really that upset, she could just stop Shinnok from being decapitated instead of meddling around with events that she really doesn’t need to mess with. Her motives and the round-about ways she takes to achieve her goals make absolutely no sense.
2 2. Jake Conway (Ride to Hell: Retribution, 2013)
A game that really needs no introduction for just how infamously bad it is. So, it’s no surprise that the main character would be on this list. Jake Conway is a Vietnam War veteran who is out for revenge after his brother is killed. I hope you weren’t expecting more characterization after that because that’s all you’re getting.
In addition to Jake’s backstory as a war vet that never affects his character, he’s also depicted as a womanizer who sleeps with just about every one-dimensional lady in the game, makes some of the most idiotic and outlandish decisions a video game character could ever make and has possibly the poorest and most unfeeling voice-acting ever.
1 1. Jessie & Zofia Blazkowicz (Wolfenstein: Youngblood, 2019)
These two get the top spot together because one just can’t be without the other. Jessie and Zofia Blazkowicz have got to be the most horrible depiction of a pair of sisters in the history of video games. If they aren’t coming at you with the cringiest of dialogue and interactions between each other, they’re dude-broing it out like a pair of dude-bros on a dude-bro adventure.
These two hardly feel like family out to save their dad. They’re more like a couple of knuckleheads out for some cheap thrills. They might as well not even be sisters.
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