What are the worst villains you can think of?

I agree, heck if Destro could sell to GI Joe as well he would. If anything Destro might be the one best positioned to shut Cobra down.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

Destro has his own gig, selling weapons to Cobra and banging the Baroness, why would he want to complicate things by taking over Cobra and becoming public enemy #1 ?

Because he´s awesome? Ok, maybe not as he was originally depicted, but definetly his newer incarnations.
In X-Men 1 he made Cyclops blast the roof off of the train station and later singlehandedly took out Jean "frikking Phoenix" Grey and Storm almost too.


Worst Villain ever?
Abomination. He´s bigger, stronger and more intelligent than the Hulk... yet he got pummeled whenever those two met.

He does, however, have those neat ear-fin things. I don't think that counts as a "power," though.

It's still difficult to think of villains worse than, say, Codpiece, mentioned in the older part of this thread.

For a character who's ridiculous even once you get past the initial oddness of the concept, consider the Porcupine, already mentioned above. Yes, he dresses as a giant porcupine. (Actually, his original outfit looked more like a pile of sticks, or perhaps a supervillainous version of Cousin It from the Addams Family.) But even beyond that, his powers are silly. Aside from the quills, he also had the power to emit various chemicals from his suit. Including ammonia. For what, cleaning up the place after he robs it?

Edit: An honorable mention for the obscure Spider-Man villain The Conquistador (not to be confused with the Astro City villain of the same name). As a kid, I had a Spider-Man record that featured him spouting the wonderful line, "Insolent dog! Die the death of a dog!" This is how I learned the word "insolent." An equally embarassing Spider-Man villain from a record was Draco, who was mutated into a neat-looking creature by being bitten by a radioactive dragon. He somehow managed to make this seem lame. He was notable for having legions of rubber-suited minions who chanted, "Draco, Draco, Draco ..."

Technically he's only stronger at the start of a fight since the Hulk gets stronger as he gets madder while Abomination doesn't.

Anyway, the Hulk is endowed with mighty plot armor, and his power level seems to know no bounds.

If they did mostly by their own choices not because you lead them into it...then no you suck. And that's the case with Sepiroth. Cloud was nuts and delusional. If Cloud were sane and manned up earlier nothing would ahve happened. Sepiroth didn't have anything to do with Cloud's actions outside the very brief possession. Hojo does more to help his plans along than he does. Again Hojo chooses to put his energy into helping him, not because Sephiroth is a good mastermind. The plot spends too much time telling Sepiroth is uber and not enough time showing. He never earns his stripes. (Luca Blight of suikoden 2 earns his very quickly, if you've seen the pig scene. He makes you hate him.)

Which doesn't help his case is the incoherent plot of final fantasy 7. The game seemed like it wasn't sure who main villain was for first part of it, and then decided at the end of the run through midgard. Which honestly was the most interesting part of the game(if it wasnt for the strong beginning I'd never bothered playing thru the game.) had focus then all suddenly throws sepiroth into the game out of left field because it felt like they just tossed 3 different stories into a meat grinder and made FF7. (take 4 stories and you get FF 8 hehe.) Shinra was far more interesting than Sepiroth was, and they really would been a better focus if they were kept as the main villains rather than pushed to back burner to fill in whenever Sepiroth and his handful of minions couldn't keep the plot crawling forever. (which was often.) Rufus was far more of magnificent basstidge than Sepiroth ever was.

A great villain is alike a murder conviction....you can't have too much circumstaneal evidence. Unfortunately for Sepiroth that's all he has. Stuff other people did to make him a threat not stuff he did to make himself a threat.

If you want to take another villain who sits back and chills but is a far better villain for it....the Lavos. Despite seemingly being the typical square villain who gains power and sits in their lair waiting for the heroes to prove them wrong this not the case. Everything in Chrono Trigger is by the Lavos' design. If the heroes did nothing then they'd played right into the villains plan, as thats precisely why they get involved in the first place. No one could stop it in the original timeline. The Lavos actually is a threat as we see it lay waste to the entire world.

What sepiroth do....die to a scrub soldier, come back to life and stab a defenseless girl in the back between long periods of waiting. The only people he ever seemed to kill were thru sneak attacks.Kefka wrecks the entire planet, countless millions. Kuja blows up one. Somehow Sepiroth for all his popularity really is a good metaphor for the game he came from. Impressive to look at, shallow and lacking on further inspection. His aesthics had done more to make him popular than his actions ever did.

I've heard people complain about that in the first X-Men movie, because there is no way in heck Toad should have been able to beat them so badly. I don't know the comics well enough to have a dog in that fight, but Jean Grey does seem rather wimpy in those first two movies.

For the whole Sephiroth thing, I have never understood the love FFVII gets. The story is all over and convoluted, completely lacking focus. Frankly, it feels like most of the Final Fantasies since then. Big, sprawling, unfocused, and altogether emo.

FFIV and VI aren't perfect, but they're much more focused and better put together.

Sephiroth is an excellent villain...just sucks as a game boss.

I'll say that comic book Destro is leaps and bound more competent than his cartoon counterpart. However I'll still stand by my opinion that Destro is one of the worst villains.

I gotta agree with you on Codpiece. Definitely one of the Doom Patrol's most cringe worthy villains, although in a twisted, inspired way.

If you say so. He mostly seemed to stand around with a massive sword and look moody. I kept waiting for them to do something more with him and they never did. Kind of like Cloud... looked much cooler than he actually was as a character.

As others have pointed out, other characters in the game were more developed and would have worked better as villains.

Sephiroth is like the shark in Jaws save for not done as well due to limited technology, he medium, or simply not creative enough. If you look at him from the way he was introduced and such if you tweaked it just right it would have made him so much better. If games were taken as a more artistic medium the tweaks I would suggest would have been made most likely and as such when I compare and ask if this was a great villain or not I give him the benefit of the doubt.

As a game boss though, to me he was a massive disappointment. Largely due to the fact that he is built up as this highly skilled, highly powerful, insane dude that doesn't care about you and can take you over at any time he wants and he goes down sooooooo easily. The Mechanics behind that fight, the gameplay itself, make him hurts him.

So in my opinion the flaws of the character come from the medium and not from the character itself. The character is genius evil touching on fears of the unknown, fear of yourself, coming to grips with reality, the betrayal of self, intimidation fear, and a number of others all mixed into this one character in a package that doesn't clash with itself... If we were to give this character to a writer and took it out of the medium of games he'd likely be classed as one of the top villains of all time in film, comics, or books, because like i said, those tweak that would be made to the story would be innate in those mediums with most good writers/directors/artists...

Holy crap!!

I thought I was the only kid to ever have that record. My favorite parts were:

"Do you prefer the gun or the sword?"
"I'll take vanilla, if you don't mind."

and...

"And now I shall crush the life from your worthless BOD-eeeeeeeeee!!"

So... the awesome character you love so much is the concept behind him, eh?

There are things about Sephiroth that are quite cool, but as you yourself are saying in this post, it's not coming out in the game. It's in the concept, and what you are putting on the character with your own thinking.

No. The presentation, the background, and many aspects are well done. It's not the concept. The little tweaks are two the presentation. The player gets to know too much about Sephiroth and see too much of him. Because of this the fear factor that makes him an awesome villain is crippled a bit.

It's kinda like Darth Vader. He's considered one of the best villains of all time, but even he, in the eyes of all the fan boys, goes from the 100% bad *** character to an 80 or 90% bad *** character due to the ep1-3 trilogy.

There are things that can mess a character up. It just so happens that the medium sephiroth is in isn't so good with story telling and presentation yet. If you were to ask me who were the best villains of the 1920s from a film I think we would have a hard time listing many as all time greats, not because the character is a bad villain, or less so than modern characters, but rather because the medium wasn't developed enough to present them right.

An emo pretty boy with an opedius complex and giant sword who sits around and does nothing is well done? Nothing you posted about Sepiroth is contained with in said game. Even in the animated storyline of advent children, he basically just waited for his posses to revive him because thats how much of a 1-dimensional Sepiroth is. (whcih Cloud solos and kicks his butt all over again.)

Jaws is a shark...so no one is expecting any compelling and is based off of an entirely different genre and medium. Most monsters weren't shown till end of movies due to bad effects and build up. Jaws was scary because Sharks are freaking scary and we're powerless in the water with them. (I'll gladly fight one on dry land weapon of choice.) it taps into a primal fear, thats very powerful.

There's nothing to be scared of with Sepiroth...especially in a game when you can summon pet monsters from no where that fire lasers from the depths of space. You aren't scaring a player in an rpg as powerful as FF7 as you re far from helpless. When I see some powerful bad guy or a challenge...I want to face it, not run away.

This we know about a villain it makes them some how worse...strongly disagree as that just basically is admitting the emperor has no clothes. if knowing the background of something makes it no longer scary...then may be it wasn't that scary to begin with. The unknown can be scary, but that's our imagination running wild. Learning the background of a villain should make them more compelling not less.

The best villains are ones which you can agree with on some level with why they are what they are(such as Magneto.), and understand them even if you'd never do what they do.(Such as Luca Blight, you find out if you look into his backstory , his mother, the Queen of the highlands was Graped right in from of his by attackers that hailed from the city state in the south when he was younger and was forced to watch. He was seriously damaged by this mentally, and will do anything to kill every single person that belongs to that country. Even if he has to kill his own people to get them as he knows he will kill those who attacked his mother. Knowing this didn't make him any less menacing. Infact you saw just how much conviction he had.) To say a villain only a good villain when you didn't know who or what they were...then they probably weren't that good of a villain to begin with.