8 Video Game Villains With Motives You Can’t Argue With

Grab your gavel: Court is in session for eight of gaming’s most misunderstood villains. Their charges? One occupied planet, one erased painting, one underwater utopia gone to rot, and a truly staggering body count. But, all that aside, what if these bad guys were actually making a somewhat decent point? Read between the lines of their melodramatic monologues, and perhaps you’ll realize that, say, a centuries-long guilt trip over one catastrophic mistake was in fact understandable rationale for wanting to tear the world down and start over. Or not: You get to decide. Just read each villain’s case file below before reaching a verdict — you might not love where the evidence actually points.

[Ed. note: This article includes spoilers for the endings of many popular AAA games.]

8

Renoir (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, 2025)

The case for him: The Renoir who fights you wants to keep the fantasy alive. The real one just wants his family to stop grieving inside it.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 splits its central antagonist, Renoir, into two separate people: one painted, one real. The painted-by-Aline Renoir fights alongside Aline to keep the Canvas — and everyone painted into it, including people the expedition has come to love — alive, cutting down anyone who threatens that world. The real Renoir, trapped for years and visibly aged compared to his idealized, painted double, wants the opposite: for the Canvas to end entirely, so the family he’s lost touch with can stop pouring their grief into a fantasy and start healing in reality. Pick a side, and you’re choosing which grieving father’s heartbreak gets to count as the real one.

7

Andrew Ryan (BioShock, 2007)

Image: Irrational Games/2K Games

The case for him: His possibly-understandable philosophy never changed. What did was how far he was willing to go once someone else’s ambition threatened his city.

Rapture, the underwater city BioShock’s Andrew Ryan built at the bottom of the Atlantic specifically to escape government oversight and religious interference, was built on one promise: A man’s success belongs to no one but himself. Ryan never walks that back, not even at the very end, when his own death via golf club is on the line. By then, many of his own denizens have curdled into addiction to ADAM, a gene-altering substance Ryan let flourish with zero oversight because, in his mind, oversight was the villain. His by-your-own-bootstraps philosophy never changed, but his willingness to enforce it certainly did — especially once Frank Fontaine’s black market started outcompeting him at his own game.

6

Kreia (Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2, 2004)

Image: Obsidian Entertainment

The case for her: She spends the game telling you the Jedi and the Sith are both wrong about the same thing. Neither side proves her wrong.

What do you do about a teacher who’s technically right about almost everything…but makes you complicit in her cruelty anyway? Kreia, the blind mentor guiding your player character through Knights of the Old Republic 2, can see more clearly than the Jedi or Sith about just how broken the galaxy’s entire relationship with the Force has become. Her argument is a good one: Total detachment and total hunger are just two different ways of avoiding the same uncomfortable truth about the Force. That said, she also siphons Force energy directly from her companions, weakening them without asking, which is slightly less defensible. And reminiscent of the same casual cost-benefit math that once led her to help gut the Jedi order she claims to be critiquing from a place of wisdom.

5

Emet-Selch (Final Fantasy 14: Shadowbringers, 2019)

Image: Square Enix

The case for him: He’ll argue his own plan’s flaws with you directly, so we have to give him points for more intellectual honesty than we’ve seen from most heroes.

Undo one apocalypse by causing a smaller one! That’s the pitch Emet-Selch spends making in Shadowbringers, the third major expansion for Final Fantasy 14. He does in fact think this is a good idea. He’ll also spend an evening drinking wine and cracking jokes about the extinction he’s engineering, then recreate the souls of his long-dead friends just to spend one more night with them. Clearly, he’s going through something. Unfortunately, enacting his plan means triggering calamities that gut the present-day population of Eorzea each time, killing real people that you as the player have spent years getting to know, in service of a civilization that’s been dead for thousands of years. To him, this is a solid trade-off — but at what cost to you and those you love?

4

Solas (Dragon Age: Inquisition, 2014)

Image: BioWare via Polygon

The case for him: He created the wall that trapped his own people, and he’s spent centuries trying to reverse that mistake.

Solas spends Dragon Age: Inquisition posing as a humble elven apostate mage traveling with the Inquisitor (your player character). He’s a trusted companion. He might even be your romantic partner. And, it turns out, he’s actually Fen’Harel, the Dread Wolf of elven legend. The Veil separating the physical world of Thedas from the sometimes-problem-causing spirit realm is something he built himself, thousands of years ago, to end a war between ancient elven gods. To give him a little credit, this worked. But it also cut his people off from their own immortality, dooming the elves to a fall their descendants can’t even remember. Solas does cry and apologize as he’s revealing what he’s done, but does feeling bad about doing something horrifying wipe his slate clean? (I haven’t played Dragon Age: The Veilguard yet, but I have heard whispers about Solas’ role in it that suggest I’m onto something here.)

3

Wallace Breen (Half-Life 2, 2004)

Image: Valve

The case for him: He surrendered humanity to an occupation. He also might be the only reason humanity still exists to resent him for it.

Half-Life 2 opens seven years after Earth loses a war against the Combine, an alien empire that conquered the planet in a matter of hours. Wallace Breen, a former scientist, has spent those seven years ruling as humanity’s chosen administrator under Combine authority. Under Breen’s administration, the citizens of City 17 live with their reproduction suppressed and their neighbors disappearing without warning or explanation.

That society is “refusing to grow” is Breen’s central argument, and through a certain lens, it might make sense. In one of his broadcast speeches, he argues that humanity surrendering to the Combine is no different than a lungfish crawling onto dry land instead of dying in water it already knows. This is a decent case for collaboration over extinction. It’s just given by a man who stayed well-fed while someone else did the enforcing.

Image: Konami

The case for him: He built a new nation for soldiers that every actual nation had already used up and thrown away.

Big Boss, born Naked Snake, spent decades as an elite soldier fighting on behalf of governments that first used and then discarded him. Metal Gear Solid 5 opens with Big Boss waking from a nine-year coma after that exact betrayal cost him an eye, an arm, and most of the left side of his face. His answer isn’t revenge against any single government — it’s building something no government can take away from the soldiers who serve it. Outer Heaven, the soldier-run nation he goes on to found, exists as his answer to a lifetime of being treated as disposable. This is undermined slightly by the fact that he still recruits child soldiers into his own ranks without visible hesitation.

1

The Illusive Man (Mass Effect 2, 2010)

Bioware

The case for him: He was willing to be the villain so humanity would have an edge against something the rest of the galaxy refused to take seriously.

Mass Effect 2’s Illusive Man runs Cerberus, a pro-human paramilitary organization the rest of the galaxy treats as a terrorist group. It’s built entirely around one belief: the Reapers, an ancient machine race that wipes out advanced civilizations on a cyclical schedule, are coming. And nobody else is taking that threat sufficiently seriously. The Illusive Man funds Commander Shepard’s own resurrection to get someone capable back in the fight. That same logic, though, lets him sacrifice operatives who trusted him personally. Tragically, it would seem that preparing for the worst can look exactly like becoming it.