What kind of villain are you hoping to see?

[Loony BoB]

Yeah, that works too! So long as there is a strong emotional feel goin' on it's all good.

Hoping for an epic musical piece to accompany the fight, and for sound effects to take a considerable backseat to emphasise it.

[Colonel Angus]

You are the villian.

You have been playing as the villian.

You have been supporting the villian.

You have been killing the innocents.

You have just killed the hero, the true hero.

You have been playing as the main villian all-long, all this time.

Imagine the mindsmurf.

Then, @ the end, they switch you out to the main hero's team & you have to defeat the party you've been playing the whole game. So, if you've been grinding, you're really screwing yourself out.

[metagloria]

Oh, one thing they must NOT do: Have the final boss be some random person that you have no emotional attachment (positive or negative) towards. I hated it with Ultimecia, I hated it with Garland, I hated it with Yu-Yevon, I hated it with Orphan, I don't expect I will enjoy it when it happens again someday in some stupid RPG. The enemy should be someone I either have seen throughout the story and grown to see as a true villain that way (eg. Sephiroth, Shinra, Kefka, Exdeath) or someone who was close to me but has betrayed me in a plot twist near the end (eg. actually come to think of it I don't know, but probably something like what shion said).

Essentially there should be emotinoal attachment to the villain. You should WANT to defeat them. I had no emotional attachment to those others. Even in FFXII there was little emotional attachment, although at least there was some. But I prefer villains that are existing from reasonably early into the game.

Throwing a random new final boss RIGHT at the end, though, a la Orphan, is a massive no-no. Yu-Yevon was no better, Ultimecia likewise. Sure, they were mentioned and I was aware of them, but they weren't the target in my head and I didn't feel like I was defeating an all powerful enemy, I felt like I was doing some random boss fight in the game and that's not cool.

I think you're totally off base including Yu Yevon in this category. His ultimate-ness actually fits with the storyline.

[Loony BoB]

I can see how he was always there or there abouts, but Sin was always seen as the "big bad guy" in the game and I had no emotional attachment towards Yu-Yevon at all when I fought him. On par with Ultimecia, really, who was always technically in control of the other sorceresses to some degree but in reality we didn't get to see her personality until the end. Neither as bad as Orphan, though, who had absolutely no personality whatsoever.

[Quindiana Jones]

You are the villian.

You have been playing as the villian.

You have been supporting the villian.

You have been killing the innocents.

You have just killed the hero, the true hero.

You have been playing as the main villian all-long, all this time.

Imagine the mindsmurf.

Then, @ the end, they switch you out to the main hero's team & you have to defeat the party you've been playing the whole game. So, if you've been grinding, you're really screwing yourself out.

This would be an amazing game. You could really customise the second half and make it truly memorable. It's kind of like Dragon's Dogma: the final boss is the old god (who you play in the Prologue before his ascension) and his Pawn against you and your Pawn. If you win, your character becomes the main diety, and can no longer directly interact with the world. But there is a new game plus (and plus and plus and plus...), in which your soul is passed on essentially. And the end boss you face the second and so on-th time around is the character that became deified the last time you completed the game! It's bloody magnificent.

[Loony BoB]

As an alternative to that: You play two people on opposing sides of a war, alternating between them. At the end, you decide who you will fight as.

[maybee]

You are the villian.

You have been playing as the villian.

You have been supporting the villian.

You have been killing the innocents.

You have just killed the hero, the true hero.

You have been playing as the main villian all-long, all this time.

Imagine the mindsmurf.

Then, @ the end, they switch you out to the main hero's team & you have to defeat the party you've been playing the whole game. So, if you've been grinding, you're really screwing yourself out.

~ wants~


I guess I'm a sucker for tragic stories.

Oh and your love interest, you choose to let her live, since you have feelings for her, but she cannot live without her friends and the people that she has met and bonded with among the adventure, so you have to take her out with the rest. Then you begin to regret what you've done, and you don't feel happy or complete or "evils " at all. You just feel like a horrible, monster that took away everything for shallow and hollow power. You just cry holding her body, in a cold, isolated, empty, dark room.

yeeeess tragic stories ~

[Pumpkin]

As an alternative to that: You play two people on opposing sides of a war, alternating between them. At the end, you decide who you will fight as.

This is actually a really good idea

[Shorty]

I'm fond of the maniacal villains who play as though they've got nothing to lose. The Joker is a prime example. He's just so perfect - no motives, no weaknesses, just a wish for pure chaos. However, I think that these villains only work in certain types of situations, and that this game might not be the best platform for a chaotic villain to work with.

From the premise of the game, it looks as if there's a clear rivalry between these two families or whatever (I'm not very familiar with the story so I"m just throwing out a guess here). I'm not really sure that anything other than a power-lusting or possibly vengeful villain will work. I hope I'm wrong, though, because on paper, villains with those motives are boring.

I don't care for the twist-betrayal villain or the random "this is the true bad guy" boss. I don't really know what I want, but I know that I don't want either of those things.

[DarkBahamut]

The main character!

[Ayen]

One that could easily be mistaken for a hero if you saw the story from just a slightly different perspective.

You are the villian.

You have been playing as the villian.

You have been supporting the villian.

You have been killing the innocents.

You have just killed the hero, the true hero.

You have been playing as the main villian all-long, all this time.

Imagine the mindsmurf.

I'm down with both of these ideas. Essentially, I'd like to see a villain whose motivations can be justifiable and blur the lines between good and evil. I won't hold my breath, though.

[DarkBahamut]

I would really like the main character to be involved a lot with the villain.
I love the idea that he is the villain the whole time, but we don't know it until the end of the game.

Or maybe the main character has an alter-ego or subconscious which is a big problem the entire time.

[metagloria]

Why does there have to be a villain? Can't everything be all right with the world, and we just get to explore and run errands for 80-100 hours of solid gameplay?

[Sephiroth]

One that could easily be mistaken for a hero if you saw the story from just a slightly different perspective.

You are the villian.

You have been playing as the villian.

You have been supporting the villian.

You have been killing the innocents.

You have just killed the hero, the true hero.

You have been playing as the main villian all-long, all this time.

Imagine the mindsmurf.

I'm down with both of these ideas. Essentially, I'd like to see a villain whose motivations can be justifiable and blur the lines between good and evil. I won't hold my breath, though.

This is pretty much what Nier is about. The main character is a bit more of a hero but in other terms not.

[metagloria]

New idea.

This is probably too open-world for an FF game, but I think it'd be sweet.

The main antagonist is some evil corporation/government hybrid like Shinra in VII, or Monsanto in real life, rather than some single figurehead. There are, let's say, four main people involved with the machinations of this corporation (think Heidegger, Scarlet, Palmer, and Reeve). Each of them controls and operates different aspects of the big bad scheme. But the game allows you to choose the order in which you take them down, and the game unfolds differently as the fewer remaining baddies scramble to restructure their evil plan as they get taken down. So by the end, you could have vastly different endings based on which person is the last one to retain power.