OK, so my introduction here was a bit long-winded and not particularly on-topic, but us Dancing Bottles types are a bit ADD. I'm actually very prone to wax philosophical when I get a notion rattling around in my head for too long.
So, onto games. I beat my copy of Pokemon White version recently, and the whole thing got me thinking...why does Garbodor have bad mouse ears?
Seriously, though, it got me thinking about villains. For those of you adverse to spoilers, read no further, because I'm about to spoil the plot of every Pokemon game ever. (The random 10 y/o kid wins!)
OK, while Pokemon is never a franchise renowned for its plot, I'm gonna stick with it as an example, because it offers us many different types of villains, fewer people mind Pokemon spoilers than, say, Final Fantasy, and N is who got me thinking in the first place.
We can start with the word "villain," which in and of itself seems to convey an evil person. This is not necessarily true. A villain is really just somebody who opposes a hero. They come in many flavors. Pokemon favored an evil villain early on, in the form of Giovanni. Here was a ruthless man who was running all of the organized crime in the Kanto region, seized control of the largest corporation in the country in an attempt to blackmail the CEO into mass-producing the best capture tool known to man for exclusive use by his criminal grunts, ordered the production of the monster known as Mewtwo, and ran all of these operations out of his Gym in Viridian City. After his sound defeat, he sees the error of his ways and vanishes, leaving you to clean up one last mess of his in Cerulean Cave.
These days, we get N, who appears before you, speaking to your Pokemon, speaking of liberation of his "friends" so that humans can never hurt them again. He talks about how his ideal will eventually drive apart people who love Pokemon and the Pokemon they love so much, and how this breaks his heart. When he clearly has the upper hand, he tells you how to oppose him, and asks you to stand as the legendary hero of Unova and try to defeat him, so he can be sure that his ideal is strongest before he completes his plan, which he's only doing for the good of Pokemon so they can be perfect beings again. So, what gives? How did we go from the perfect mafia boss to PETA and still have a working antagonist on our hands?
Villains have some important components. These include (but aren't limited to) character, motive, and plans. Giovanni was shown clearly to have all three, with a personality befitting a mafia don, a very understandable motive of wanting more money and power, and plans that involved a lot of brute force and intimidation. He worked well. N, on the other hand, showed a very kind and empathic personality, a strong desire to liberate Pokemon from perceived suffering, and he planned to reenact the legend of the hero who rallied all of Unova behind him without the need for force. While the two are both polar opposites, they both exist as viable villains because they can fulfill important criteria of being such. For similar reasons, Teams Aqua and Magma fell flat, because they couldn't. Their characterizations were bland, their motives were frankly stupid (a desire to destroy all/most land/water in the world is in no way realistic), and their master plans were to awaken the ancient beasts of legend (with the wrong Orbs) to fight to the death like it said in the legends of old... The same legends that mentioned the fight would be stopped by Rayquaza and his GIANT SPACE LAZOR... And we're left with a facepalming player and hero who has to clean up after a pack of morons.
We as players crave villains we can understand. We don't have to agree; it's often better if we don't. But there is also a market for villains we don't get. Team Aqua and Team Magma were in that category, but failed to deliver us an experience. For villains who did, we can turn to the likes of Cyrus and Cipher. Cipher was a great villainous organization, but it's not because we got their motives. They were hauling in innocent Pokemon, turning them into heartless killing machines, and giving them away to a poverty-torn region, rife with street rats and crooks, and utterly devoid of wild Pokemon. To what end? We're not sure. But that was scary. The plan was something that worried us, because we could extrapolate it to logical conclusions. Maybe Shadow Pokemon had a trigger that would make them obey Cipher. Maybe they were establishing a black market to finance a larger machination. Who knows? And Cyrus? How are we supposed to understand a man with no emotion whatsoever? And the scary part with him is that he WON. His plan was flawless, and only foiled by something he thought didn't exist. We couldn't understand where he was coming from, but he was a terror, because he almost undid the whole world.
Now, moving off of Pokemon, we can put this discussion into the scope of villains as a whole. Villain-crafting is needed in pretty much any series, all in assorted scopes and backgrounds. From the standpoint of a would-be game designer and frequent DM, I can cite one huge pitfall I often see with villain design, and that is the favorite archetypes. Villains have trends, it seems. Some people have a favorite build for the persona and motive, or for how the plans should go. And let me tell you, it gets stale. Villains are so variable. One of the most refreshing moments for me was when, after a long string of complex personas, complicated motives, and borderline agreeable philosophies, I got to a villain who was ready to end the world because of a simple inferiority complex. He was immature, but not totally unrealistic. Remember, not all villains are pure evil, but they can't all be good or ambiguous. Jok the barbarian probably doesn't threaten the world, but the Unholy Goddess Tr'anik probably doesn't care about the remote peasant village. Hell, not all of them even need to pose a threat in the classic sense.
So, in short, we at Dancing Bottles advocate diverse, three-dimensional villains, so keep some of these basic concepts in mind when designing or analyzing villains. For our own projects, we've tried very hard to keep our villains feeling quite alive and variable. For designing your own villains for any purpose, I highly recommend checking out Rich Burlew's take on it instead of just listening to me ramble.
Until next time.
-the Hill Giant
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