For some rulers, it’s not enough that they control a vast dominion. They also have to treat their subjects as though they were constipated grumps with no sense of morality. Hence came forth the usual and favorite villain stereotype in media, gaming included: the evil tyrant. Granted, there’s no “good” tyrant, but some of them in gaming are too difficult to like or appreciate.
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Their crimes range from bringing multiple apocalypses to a plethora of human rights violations that even their followers just can’t ignore blindly. In hindsight, they make for a good storytelling element. Players not only get to enjoy and justify their rebellious gameplay, but they also get a good metric of what behavior to condemn in a leader.
8Diablo – Diablo Franchise
Diablo has existed in many forms and iterations in the manyDiablogames out there and all of them have one thing in common (apart from the name): he’s a walking apocalypse trigger. He’s one of the quintessential dark lords in gaming. As the supremeruler of Hellin theDiablomythos and theLord of Terror, Diablo’s crimes are too many to count and too heavy to weigh.
While he also wants to rule everything — including measly humans, Diablo and his brothers do it in a painful and macabre way, often corrupting their victims and turning them into soulless husks and depraved vandalisms of their former selves. If that’s not enough, Diablo and his brothers also want to change reality through the Worldstone.
7Chaos Gods – Warhammer Franchise
If there were demon gods that could make Diablo look like a lost puppy in comparison, then those would be the four gods of Chaos in theWarhammermythos. Each one of them represents a domain or aspect of corruption: Khorne is the Blood Good who rewards violence and anger, Slaanesh is the Lord of Pleasure and Excess, Nurgle is the Plague Lord and loves disease, and Tzeentch is the Lord of Change and deception.
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Each of them also enacts and rewards their own forms of corruption among their followers. Needless to say,they’re behind thestruggles, deaths, and suffering in theWarhammermythos. Those who want to avoid these hardships by joining and serving these Chaos Gods are in for a surprise asthese four deities can be just as cruel to their followersas they are to their victims.
6Pontiff Sulyvahn – Dark Souls 3
Speaking of tyrants who love slavery and suffering for their victims and followers alike, Pontiff Sulyvahn takes the evil crown among allDark Soulstyrants. He’s the worst out of all of them. Heruined his own kingdom— and that’s still pretty common amongDark Soulsrulers who fell out of grace.
What makes Pontiff Sulyvahn worse is how heforced all his subjects to becomegrotesque mutantsand to serve an ever-hungry god named Aldrich. It just so happens that Aldrichprefers preyto prayers, and demands regular sacrifices to keep himself fed. It was Pontiff Sulyvahn and his lackeys who kept Aldrich fat with amountain of sacrifices.
5Pagan Minn – Far Cry 4
Moving on to something more relatable in a real-world context, Pagan Minn fromFar Cry 4is a haunting parallel to many modern-day tyrants. He’s themad dictatorof the fictional country of Kyrat, which is a bootleg video game version of Nepal. Players get to see Pagan Minn’s atrocity firsthand. He tortures innocents and shoots innocents on a whim.
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To make matters worse, he’s quite unpredictable with hisfits of insanity. Even worse, hesurrounds himself with equally wicked and bloodthirsty cronieswith whom he also grants massive military power. Pagan Minn did just about anything to keep Kyrat in its destitute, war-torn third-world country status. He even changed Kyrat’s currency just to ensure that citizens with monetary savings remain poor.
4Dogeyes Lin – Sleeping Dogs
Again, he’s a tyrant who operates on a smaller scale. This time, it’s a Triad crime lord named Dogeyes Lin fromSleeping Dogswhose transgressions in the crime underworld make him a turbulent threat even to his peers. Some of his worst crimes weredrugging prostitutesandforcing them to workin a never-ending cycle to fund their amphetamine addiction.
Of course, there’s also the usual Triad stuff like torture by mutilation, human trafficking, and extortion. Even the other Triad crime lords were not fond of him due to hisdishonorable and twisted methods of earning incomefor their organized crime group. Of course, if thatwasn’t evil enough, he also dabbles in drug manufacturing and trade. It’s like he has a bucket list of all possible crimes.
3Adolf Hitler – Wolfenstein Franchise
TheWolfensteinseries (both the original and the remakes) took everything that the world knew about Hitler and turned him into a more evil and sick despot who won World War 2 in an alternate history. So just about all of realHitler’s crimes are also included and amplified in these games. That includes eugenics, racial purges, massacres, forced labor, mass sexual assault, and many other war crimes and human rights violations.
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Then, they imagine how an older Hitler would behave as seen inWolfenstein 2: The New Colossus.There, on top of the psychological burdens of his massive crimes, Hitler also has somefrequent psychotic fitsand would shoot people in the head just because he can.
2Rodrigo Borgia – Assassin’s Creed 2
Some of the worst kinds of tyrants are those who have managed to convince or fool their servants of their innocence. A wolf in sheep’s clothing per se, and among those, Rodrigo Borgia fromAssassin’s Creed 2is quite deplorable. Throughmurder and deceit, heabused the power and privilege of being a Popein order to secure both Rome and the Vatican as his seat of power.
Borgia practically turned all of Renaissance Rome upside down and robbed it of its immediate future just to maintain power for himself and his children (Cesare and Lucretia Borgia, later on). He’s also a member of the Templar organization, which seeks to enslave and control all human beings, though Rodrigo didn’t need that push tobecome evil.
1Saburo Arasaka – Cyberpunk 2077
Arasaka has always been portrayed as the corporation not just inCyberpunk 2077but in all of gaming as a whole. This is a mega-corporation that treats human lives like an asset that’s cheaper than money. Led by its functionally immortal magnate Saburo Arasaka, the company toys with the idea of immortality by preserving a person’s brain and using live, organic bodies to essentially transfer souls.
But Saburo doesn’t just use it for immortality. He also uses this technology on his enemies in order to deny them the peace of death. By preserving their consciousness, Saburo gets to eternally imprison whoever he can. When one thinks about it, that’s worse than slavery. Saburo Arasakaessentially controls a person’s soul like some kind ofcyber Devil.
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