Disapointing Villains

[Karifean]

Just one sentence.

"My motives are... complex."

[Fox]

All the Reapers in Mass Effect apart from Sovereign. They just... didn't feel threatening. Even though you literally watch them destroy basically everyone on Earth at the start of Mass Effect 3, they're still just nameless space squid things that you don't really interact with for most of the game.

[Wolf Kanno]

Speaking of the Patriots, they go here as well, they were trippy and poorly explained in MGS2, coming across as some weird omniscient force of nature, but MGS4 kind of does away with all that ann makes them feel more like a background force that's never directly confronted. Again, just kind of felt hollow.

Doesn't really help their case that instead of a hundred year old shadow organization it turns they're just some buddies of yours that gained total power because reasons and had that power usurped by a computer program. Plus most of them die off screen before MGS2 even happens due to bulltrout retcons and the only one still alive during 4 is a guy so old and enfeebled he's basically a vegetable.

Well MGSV made the blow a little better by giving us a little more background on the Patriots creation. I feel Signit was never really that bad, and Zero was pretty much redeemed in MGSV. I feel only Para-Medic still falls into the "whoa, when did you become psycho?" deal, but even then, there is so little information from her side of things concerning the Les Efants Terible Project and the one that made Cyborg Ninja, that she may have not been as bad since we've only really heard about both incidents from people who didn't care, or were adversely effected.

Wilhelm from Xenosaga is another I never cared for, it never really helped that we all figured out back in Episode 1 that he was the real big bad, but he ultimately comes across as a poorly developed expy of Krellian from Xenogears. It didn't help that he was upstaged by the superior Yuriev or the scene stealing Albedo, Margulis, and Virgil. Even Cherenkov ultimately gave a greater lasting impression than he did. Kevin was also kind of disappointing but, again, we all saw it coming as far back as Episode 1.

i don't see the resemblance. Krelian was a friendzoned jerk who decided to kill everyone in the world. Wilhelm is an explicitly inhuman force trying to save the universe.

Wilhelm always comes across as very...distant, amoral, because he is exactly that way. He's nothing but an embodied aspect of the universe. Krelian tries to pull off the stoic and detached thing but even the Gazel call him out on how he's failing at it.

There is so much more about Krelian though, people get hung up on the love triangle deal, but when you really look at the situation, it wasn't just about losing Sophia, he also lost faith in the cause she had convinced him to dedicate his life to, betrayed by Shevat who really just wanted equal power to Solaris than to actually liberate mankind, and he also lost faith in the merciful god that Sophia had preached about. His whole worldview was destroyed and he simply sought to find a new truth to replace it, with a healthy dose of revenge. Had he really been hung up on Sophia, he would have pursued Elly as a romantic interest, but by the point of Fei's timeline, Krelian simply wants to meet the true god, the Wave Existence, and he wants to fulfill Sophia's belief that mankind can eventually rise above our natures to do so, he just was going to do it in a way where mankind was going to have to go through with it whether they wanted to or not. So it's not about him moping over his dead not-girlfriend, as much as it's him growing so misanthropic that he decided he was going to force mankind to be better. There is just a lot more complexity to his motive and characters than Wilhelm, who is basically just a humanoid embodiment of a fail-safe switch to stop mankind from ending the universe.

All the Reapers in Mass Effect apart from Sovereign. They just... didn't feel threatening. Even though you literally watch them destroy basically everyone on Earth at the start of Mass Effect 3, they're still just nameless space squid things that you don't really interact with for most of the game.

Yeah, the Reapers got less terrifying with each new game.

[Christmas]

That Diablo Reaper Angel guy. His whole plan is flawed and he is a wimp.