As mentioned in the TRS thread, Paireon is planning on starting a cleanup of the example lists; if you disagree with the removal of a particular example, please take it to the forums and/or the discussion page instead of simply adding them again.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Others
Chairman Stahl from the newest Killzone qualifies the minute the player lays eyes on him. Like most CMs, he just exudes an aura of hatred and disrespect for everything in existence. He is utterly without remorse for any and all atrocities he performs, from testing experimental weapons on P.O.W.s to laughing as he kills his rival in a particularly gruesome manner. And he is entirely convinced of his own superiority over everyone from his soldiers to the protagonists. They're all tools to be used and/or destroyed, in his mind.
The Pfhor and Tycho from Marathon. Tycho in particular, as he knows that what he's doing is wrong, and doesn't even want to use the humans. He just wants to see them suffer. The worst part of the series is when the player has to take orders from him. Tycho also managed to assist in destroying a planet and, in one alternate time line in Marathon Infinity, enslaving all of humanity- all without a physical body.
While Castlevania has many evil characters and monsters, the series has very little Complete Monsters. The witch, Actrise, of Castlevania 64 and Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness may be the most evil villain in the series. Not only does she and Gilles De Rais torment Henry's family, but is the main tormentor of Carrie and the Fernandez clan as well, and is a major antagonist in Carrie's game (Death is Reinhardt's). Actrise turns Carrie's fallen cousin against her, forcing her to mercifully kill her for good. In the final battle between the two, Actrise mentions how she sacrificed the life of her own child in order to obtain eternal life. Carrie calls her pathetic and tells how her mother sacrificed her life for her and that she truly loved her (also stating how pathetic it was that Actrise never showed that kind of love to her own child). Once defeated, Actrise's true face is shown, with Carrie giving a Badass Boast to cement how pathetic the witch really was.
Carrie: I have the power to subdue Dracula himself. You had no chance. Dracula knows this. He used you merely to delay me.
Legacyof Kain has several of these: Moebius, the Hylden Lord, and to an extent, Kain himself. However, the most prevalent is the Elder God. Follow the trail of ruin and disaster to the source: the Elder God orchestrated the war between the Hylden and the Ancients, resulting in the Hylden being banished to a Hell dimension and the Ancients becoming Vampires. The Elder God later decided he didn't like the Vampires anymore, so he orchestrated a war between them and humans, which wiped out most of the Vampires except Kain. Kain later began a second war that ended with humans enslaved by Vampires. So basically, as directly stated in the last game, the entire history of the series is full of the three major races in the world killing and enslaving and wiping each other out, over and over again for dominance, and all this was caused by the Elder God. Why? Just because he likes being able to control the world however he likes it, so whenever he decides he doesn't like the guys in power any more, he has someone else overthrow them. Oh, and he was also hungry for their souls, too.
Pious Augustus of Eternal Darkness. While he is The Dragon to an ancient evil god (you can choose from three), he is the main antagonist. When you first see him, he is a playable character, a Roman legionaire who stumbled on an ancient temple in Persia. In the end, he is corrupted by one of three artifacts and serves that god. It is not known when he crosses the Moral Event Horizon, but he is clearly over it for the rest of the game, committing horrific acts gleefully, including throwing hundreds of innocent people into a tower of corpses during Roberto Bianci's scenario (him included). He kills other characters you play as as well. In the final battle, Alex as well as all the spirits of those killed trying to stop Pious do battle. Alex kills Pious for good with his own staff if you win, although he hints before his death that Alex killing him would actually make things worse. But if you lose, you see a special scene of Pious gloating over a dead Alex. It is also implied in one cutscene that he may intend to betray his god in the future (during the Xel'latoth arc).
The Combine from Half-Life 2 certainly qualify. They ceaselessly, thoughtlessly, and efficiently subjugate entire races for their own purposes, and seem to have no motive other than complete and utter domination. Furthermore, they also seek to weaponize certain other members of alien species to allow for further conquering. And the fact that they created the Stalkers, well, there's just no other apt description for them.
Al-Asad and Imran Zakahev from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Al-Asad, with Zakahev's help of course, overthrew a democratic government in an unknown middle eastern country, taking power in a coup. You actually get to see first hand how his men kill anyone who resists and how they line up innocent people and use them as target practice. Since Al-Asad is such a Dirty Coward (like most real life dictators), he is not even cool. Zakahev is even worst. He supplied Al-Asad with weapons for the coup ( including a nuke), and too staged a bloody coup, except on a much larger scale in Russia. He orders the slaughtering of whole villages of people, and he obviously does not care how many people die. However, both of these guys worst act was basically the same: Al-Asad nuked a major city, his own capital, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people and about 30,000 American soldiers. Zakahev did it to kill as many Americans as he could, and Al-Asad did it so he didn't have to worry about the Americans coming after him, so he can run like the Dirty Coward he is.
Vladimir Makarov in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 walks right past the Moral Event Horizon in one of the first missions (and takes the player with him) when he and his crew cold-heartedly slaughter an entire airport terminal full of civilians. He then follows this by shooting the player in the head so that the crime can be placed on the CIA, thus inciting the international community against the Americans.
He manages to become even more monstrous in the third game, where he single handedly starts World War III, massacring millions of people with bio weapons, including SOAP.
System Shock: SHODAN. After the hacker removed her ethical restraints from her, SHODAN took over Citadel Station, hacked into the machinary, putting the security system and protocol droids at her will, and turned the people on board into her mutant zombie slaves!!! Even EDWARD DIEGO, whose idea it was to unleash SHODAN in the FIRST PLACE!!! To top it off, she planned on using the station's mining laser to ANNIALATE THE PLANET, AND TURN THE EARTHLINGS INTO MORE ZOMBIE SLAVES!!!!
SHODAN remained a spine-chilling entity residing within the corridors of the Von Braun in the second game. She tricks you into thinking she was Dr. Janice Polito, then you enter Polito's office and SHODAN tells you to kill off her former creations: The Many. This sounds like a good idea, but she recruited Dr. Marie Delacroix for that same purpose, and yet she abandoned her and left her to die on Deck 6 Cargo Bay A, and she tried to discourage you from entering Cargo Bay A to find her body. Plus, as you do her bidding, she keeps on calling you "insect" or "irritant" over and over, constanly reminding you how inferior you are compared to her. It doesn't help that she belittled you while still pretending to be Polito. And even after you finally despose of the Many, she abandons you like she did Delacroix! And once you finish her off once and for all, she starts posessing poor Rebecca Siddons! Yeesh! I can't believe she wasn't on this page.
Many Nazi soldiers, including Colonel Kamm, in Velvet Assassin. This is probably the most brutal portrayal of the Nazis in a video game, and coming from a German development studio, this is notable. The events of the clearing of the Warsaw Ghetto of Jews after the unsuccessful uprising is portrayed as well as the brutal Gestapo prisons. The innkeeper and his wife and child are hung in a mission and in the final level, a church with villagers locked inside is set on fire. Violette fails to reach them in time.
One soldier calls burning bodies in a ditch an "art".
Anyone who's played Cave Story can tell you exactly why the Doctor was "like a demon." The Mengele-style Psycho Serum experiments using the local race of Ridiculously Cute Critters? Just the tip of the iceberg.
Westin Phipps of City of Heroes, whose missions, rather than being the standard Supervillainy jobs, are all meant to merely cause even greater suffering amongst the poor, to destroy the hopes of the downtrodden and to basically make people with already crappy lives even worse.
Phipps deliberately poses as a charity worker helping the poor of Grandville, in order to find out what minor hopes they have so that Arachnos (and the player, if you have Phipps as a contact) may more effectively crush them.
Phipps is so universally reviled that when a Going Rogue tip mission offered the option to either A) Undo the damage caused by Phipps's arc by rescuing his victims, or B) deliver a superpowered beatdown to Phipps some players had a hard time deciding!
Don't forget Emperor Marcus Cole and his Praetors.
During the war against Hamidon, Tyrant stood by and let everyone in the world who refused to submit to his rule perish. Now he's building an army specifically to hunt down and murder every single super-powered being on every other alternate Earth, so he can conquer them all.
Mother Mayhem runs a mental asylum devoted to training Praetorian psychics as "Seers," thought-police who track down and apprehend any "thought criminals," so that "Mother" can "rehabilitate" them. But the Seers aren't volunteers, and that's actually the secondary purpose of the Seer Network; the primary purpose is to provide "Mother" with psychics to feed on, prolonging her own life and expanding her personal power.
And those "thought criminals" wind up as guinea pigs for Neuron's bio-weapon experiments, as does pretty much anyone else he wants, even a "hero cop" from the PPD.
Chimera's Secret Police and assassins round up any dissidents that the Seer Network misses, and his relationship with Belladonna is basically what happens when Batman murders the Graysons so he can take Dick under his wing as Robin.
Marauder and Dominatrix secretly supply the Destroyers with Fixadine, artificially creating a threat to public safety that gives Tyrant an excuse for his totalitarian regime.
Anti-Matter might be the lone exception, as his missions involve the PC preventing a staggering loss of life against the wishes of the other Praetors. But even he murdered the man who helped him create the Clockworks, inadvertently unleashing the Praetorian Clockwork King, "Metronome," upon the world.
There are "good" and "evil" people among both the Loyalists and the Resistance, but the Emperor and his Praetors themselves are unambiguously evil.
And on the topic of the Resistance, we have Hatchet, who feeds living human beings to Ghouls - which he uses as unwilling suicide bombers. Ghouls are sentient.
The Protagonist in Soul Nomad & the World Eaters becomes this should he agree to side with Gig in the beginning of the game, going in a warpath across the world with the help of some evil characters (or characters who end up turning evil/psychotic because of you), including the leader of a child slavery gang who even begins to get sick of you. Even Omnicidal Maniac Gig shows disturbance towards you. Another example would be Hawthorne, who is revealed to be a serial rapist/murderer who buys girls off of Black Market dealer Lobo (who's a nasty individual himself) to rape and kill when they reach seventeen.
To expand: the "worst" ending of the Demon Path results in the main character literally killing his way through everything in two worlds, leaving nothing alive but himself and Gig. He then proceeds to devour Gig and gain god-level powers, at which point the gods of the two worlds he has just finished exterminating show up and demand that he stop destroying everything. He proceeds to beat them both and blast both worlds into nothingness. His last words before joining two worlds in their total annihilation? "It doesn't matter. It was fun."
A majority of the villains can count in the normal path some of which end up joining you in the Demon Path. They range from Dark Messiah Kanan, ruthlessly selfish Lobo, Mad Scientist World Eater Thuris and Levin/Raksha, who stands on the edge of this and Magnificent Bastard.
King Strauss VIII, while not directly engaging the player in the normal path, is a lesser Complete Monster, but still very much one. The guy taxes his kingdom to oblivion just to pay for a Crimson Tear, one of the most taboo artifacts in the world. He gave away the son of his most loyal general to the Nereids in exchange for curing his own wife of a grave illness - and the Nereids are reasonably nice people to boot (being a Single Gender Species, they need a male of another species to reproduce). He has said general arrested - and executed - when said general appealed to the council in question of the king's character (with legit evidence provided by the player party). And, on top of that, he's had his own men quarantine Feinne and keep all trespassers away from her just so he could control the World Eater himself with the Crimson Tear. Thankfully, for this last bit, it ends just as well as you'd expect.
Gig:In case you are wondering why they are called "World Eaters", well there you go.
Rugal Bernstein from King of Fighters is quite probably the most evil villain SNK has ever come up with. In contrast with Geese Howard (a BadassMagnificent Bastard with a tragic backstory), Wolfgang Krauser (a Noble Demon with a strong sense of honor), the Knight Templar Orochi clan, or even NESTS (who at least have Take Over the World as a motive)... Rugal does evil for the sake of being evil. We're talking about a man who owns one of the world's biggest weapons manufacturers, has a BIG influence on global politics, is capable of causing World War III, and killed God-knows-how-many martial artists just to bathe their bodies in liquid bronze and make them into decorative statues for his yacht, FOR SPORT. And that's not even going into Heidern's backstory, where we find out that Rugal slaughtered all 50 soldiers in the guy's squad before killing his wife and daughter, who he had previously kidnapped, just for the fun of it, and topping it off with gouging out Heidern's left eye and leaving him to live in despair. When Rugal was finally consumed and killed by the Orochi power he had gotten from Goenitz, it was probably a joyous day for all fighting game players everywhere.
Geese wasn't exactly innocent himself. I mean he did rob two young boys of a father out of jealousy. But the real nasty bastards of SNK are NESTS. Kidnapping innocent children and putting them through God knows what kind of experiments, and very, very few of them even survived. The ones that did ended up either completely bitter and hateful (K', K9999, Kusanagi) or submissive, loyal slaves (Nameless, Kula.) And then there is Igniz. The guy who's implied to be responsible for all of this. Just look at what a smarmy prick he is when you fight him, he really doesn't feel anything about what he had to do to get that powerful.
Funny thing is, SNK even tried to salvage Rugal from this trope by revealing his Freudian Excuse: apparently, he was once a kind and loving man, but after the death of the woman he loved (hey, he did father Adel and Rose...), he went crazy and swore revenge on the whole world. Needless to say, this earned him no sympathy at all, as nothing could ever excuse his atrocities - much less a reason as weak as this one.
Flying Fox, The Dragon of King Bohan from Heavenly Sword, outdoes Bohan himself in terms of sheer nastiness. Sick, twisted and utterly sadistic, this guy was responsible for driving poor Kai crazy. And then he breaks her more when he reveals that he stuffed and mounted her murdered mother as a display piece.
Shinji Matou quickly establishes himself as a Jerkass by his treatment of Shirou (who is, by all accounts, his only friend). It only gets worse from there, from his abuse of his younger sister Sakura and horrible mistreatment of his Servant Spirit (apparently including rape), to his greatly over-inflated ego alternating with his complete cowardice, to his Attempted Rape on a tied-up and helpless Rin. Oh, and his willingness to kill an entire school to make his servant stronger. Heaven's Feel gives him a Freudian Excuse (a massive inferiority complex due to various things), which explains but doesn't excuse the revelation that he's been raping Sakura for years. His painful demise at Berserker's hands in Fate and Sakura's in HF come as welcome relief (though the latter immediately led to Sakura's Freak Out...).
Notably, he can be redeemed once, but only after suffering a memorableHumiliation Conga and a karmic Fate Worse than Death. Being made into the near-literal heart of hell finally seemed to scare him straight, but only after he ordered the death of Ilya and gloated about it, laughing in apparent triumph as Gilgamesh rips Ilya's heart out.
Still, seeing as he gets that heart planted in him later, it's a magnificent karmic bitchslap.
What is also notable is that, despite the game giving no evidence to suggest that his redemption is anything but genuine, a large proportion of the fanbase (especially Sakura fans) simply doesn't believe that he's genuinely changed.
The manga seems to have averted this trope somewhat, or is at least making a valiant effort to do so (might be in part due to generally being Lighter and Softer, though). Upon Rider's defeat, an entire chapter is dedicated to explaining why anyone might be friends with someone like Shinji Matou, making him more relatable despite his actions up until then. Not to mention that after making up in a hospital bed, he's remorseful to the point of trying to openly confess to one of his classmates (Ayoko Mitsuzuri, if I recall) that he attempted to kill everyone - although she's naturally disbelieving, her forgiving attitude towards him despite his Jerkass attitude up until then (coupled with hearing that Sakura's been visiting him despite his treatment of her) have made his redemption in this incarnation of the story a shitload more plausible. Having a character actually behave like a human being on a more consistent basis without resorting to extreme measures can do wonders for the audience's perception of them.
Ironically, the writer's did try to give him an Alas, Poor Villain moment by revealing the reason he became bad in the first place. The fans bought it even less than they bought Shinji's since Zouken had leapt over the line too much - and his excuse for being bad was too weak - to redeem him of all the abhorrent deeds he'd committed, particularly towards Sakura.
This works even less following the first episode of the recently-adapted anime of Fate/zero. You get to see in gruesome, high-definition detail just what Zouken did to Sakuya. It isn't pretty. It really, really isn't pretty. After watching the scene, be prepared to need a shower to feel clean again. And he just laughs at it. Any possible sympathy towards a character who most people, knowing only the anime of Fate/stay night, wouldn't know is lost within two minutes of meeting them. That has to be a record.
An interesting case must be made for Kirei Kotomine, who seems to be one in both the Fate and Unlimited Blade Works scenarios - thanks to his Kick the Dog moments like taking Bazett Fraga Mc Remitz's arm from her to obtain Lancer and his desire to (apparently) destroy the world simply because he can - but this is effectively averted for those who played Heaven's Feel and read Fate/zero. The crux of his character is that he was born completely incapable of feeling pleasure unless he was causing pain, and yet his upbringing and natural conscience prevent him from having the Lack of Empathy which would make him a traditional monster (and comfortable with who/what he is). Fate/zero saw him finally accept his dark side, and Heaven's Feel reveals the real reason he wants the Holy Grail - he wants to discover why he was born the way he is. YMMV on where he stands, but his character is buttloads more complex than the typical Complete Monster - not to mention, once you actually learn his backstory, he no longer crosses off several of the five criteria.
In Tsukihime this falls to either Nero Chaos or Makihasa Tohno. The first one's Establishing Character Moment is killing and eating over 100 people because he can without even paying the slightest attention to doing so. No sympathetic aspects are ever attached to him and his entire reason for living is simply living long enough to see what kind of horrible monster he'll end up becoming. The second one raped a girl for years starting at the age of nine or ten, tops. Plus murdered the entire Nanaya clan except Shiki for no apparent pressing reason. Some other bad stuff concerning his treatment of Shiki, SHIKI and Akiha as well. Oh, and finally, the fact that he randomly murdered the family pets occasionally and nobody appears to find this a strange event for him in retrospect is a pretty clear indication that he was not a model citizen before dying at the start of the game.
Phantom Of Inferno has the character Scythe Master, in the first ten minutes it is established that he used a combination of drugs and hypnosys to erase the main character's memories, why? Because saw his potential as an assassin wanted to test a new theory. He then leaves the main character to train for months in the Mojave desert with no contact from the outside world. If this wasn't bad enough this was the second experiment. The First person he experimented on he rapes, brainwashes, trains as a serial killer and treats like property, oh and the girl was twelve when he started this. A third person he experiments on he doesn't drug or rape, but he does basiclly lie to her about events, encourages her growing hatred and turns her full Yandere just to mess with the main character. Oh and while he is doing this with her, he is repeating his first experiment, six times over, just in case. Seriously there is not a good ending in the game where he doesn't die.
Lord Galcian from Skies Of Arcadia. His Dragon is a little more sympathetic, even though he goes completely nuts by the end of the game, but the Big Bad himself crosses the horizon really, really hard for such an optimistic game.
Just to elaborate? This is a man who, when he gets control of an ancient superweapon, decides to demonstrate its power to the world by using it on his own country. It's the most powerful nation, after all... if he can destroy it so easily, the others will fall in line, right?
Hanne Lichthammer, the psychic Nazi commander from Clive Barker's Jericho (by Clive Barker). Her sadomasochistic, psychotic behaviour in the game is fairly tame in comparison to what is revealed in her unlockable character bio: she delights in torturing people - and not just physically, either. She enjoys using her powerful psychic powers to expose her victims' innermost fears and memories, and in the process breaking their minds and driving them insane. Her bio includes just a couple of the results of such mental torture: it caused mothers to devour their own children and other victims to dissect themselves, amongst countless other atrocities.
AM from both the short story and the point and click game I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison. A sentient master-computer, he's already wiped out most of the human race before the story even begins, keeping five people alive for 109 years for him to torture physically and psychologically until the end of time. To save time, here's the most horrible of his tortures: trapping Ellen in a virtual reality simulation of the elevator where, years earlier, she was tortured and raped by a psychopath disguised as a repairman- with a simulation of the 'repairman'...
Gongora, the Big Bad of Lost Odyssey, is identifiable as a Smug Snake even before it's clear that he's the villain, but as the game's backstory is revealed it becomes clear that he crossed the Moral Event Horizon before the game had even begun. Since several of the main characters of the game are immortal and unkillable, he had to get creative in getting them out of his way... which he did by sealing away their memories, leaving them completely amnesiac and unaware of their origins, which all of them agree is something like being a walking corpse. Of course, for him to be able to do it in the first place, they had to go through something traumatic enough that they wouldn't want to remember... so he abducted Kaim and Sarah's daughter and left them believing she was dead, forced Seth to kill her best friend to save her son, and set giant monsters loose in Ming's kingdom to slaughter her subjects until she agreed to block off her own memories to save them. As a result, Kaim and Seth both end up working for him, Ming becomes a figurehead in the country she's ruled for a thousand years, and Sarah goes insane for several decades.
And as if that weren't bad enough, near the end of the game after the other immortals have overcome all of that, he magically controls Jansen and forces him to attack his friends and love interest, apparently just to be a Jerkass.
In the second stage of Hitman Contracts, you are hired to take out Campbell Sturrock, the Meat King, and his Amoral Attorney, as well as bringing back your client's daughter who was taken by Sturrock's sick bastard brother, whose kidnapping case fell apart at a vital stage due to the lawyer's maneuvering. When you find the girl during the course of the mission, it turns out that the brother killed her in sick fashion. Though the mission requires you to kill both Sturrock and the lawyer as well as bringing back the girl's arm so it can be used as evidence to put the brother away for murder, some players make a point of killing the brother as well for being a Complete Monster.
Old King from Armored Core 4A. A member of the Well-Intentioned Extremist group, Orca, this guy seems to just be along for the ride. The other members are out to break corporation control and expand out to space. Old King? He wants to kill everyone in the colonies, just for shits and giggles. Getting better, he gets you to do it. That's 100 million dead for the record. You cross the Moral Event Horizon so hard that: The Big Bad, the Lady of War, the Cold Sniper, Roadie, and your own Mission Control, join forces to kill you. If you win, you apparently go on to do even worse.
Trauma Center's first Big Bad, Erick Von Reitenau aka Adam, is the hypocritical Nietzsche Wannabe leader of a terrorist organization who believes medicine is a product of the devil and mankind deserves to be destroyed for rejecting the "gift" of death. In order to do so, he has created artificial parasites called GUILT, all of which are highly contagious and capable of killing their victims in horrible ways all while claiming biblical justification by equating GUILT with the Seven Plagues of Revelation and himself with the "devouring angel" Abbadon (yup, the one with the locusts), all the while boasting to Derek that he alone will watch as Derek and friends burn in Hell. Despicable, yes, but when Derek and Angie join the raid on Delphi's floating headquarters, they discover something that makes him truly irredeemable - in order to cultivate his biological weapon, Adam has kept seven children (dubbed "Sinners" to go with his deranged ideology) in a nightmarish near-death state as culture grounds for the GUILT. Makes it even worse when you think such a horrible fate could have befallen Angie as well...
And, in the sequel, Adam's grandson Heinrich is an even worse person than his already despicable grandfather ever was. When you find out that he has used his own son and daughter as GUILT living incubators, you'll probably wish you could just save Karl and Christine's lives, and leave Heinrich to die in pain and alone when he contracts his own artificial disease.
In BioShock, there are at least a couple examples:
Dr. Suchong from BioShock, the Mad Scientist responsible for bioengineering Jack, the player character. A thoroughly nasty gent who is caught on tape ordering Jack to snap a poor puppy's neck. However, Suchong suffers an appropriately unpleasant Karmic Death after he grabs an Idiot Ball: in a moment of exasperation, he slaps a Little Sister and promptly gets drilled to death by an angry Big Daddy.
It gets even better: he created the Big Daddies, and should know better than anyone in Rapture the ferocity of their Papa Wolf instincts. Granted, he was distracted by personal musings and probably didn't think through what he was doing.
Alongside the prior point: At the time that Little Sister distracted him and he issued that ill-advised smack, he was ranting about his inability to get the Big Daddies to bond. Perhaps he was referring to bonding outside of a threat situation... or perhaps that was the time he finally got it right, so far as he did, and he just didn't realize it until it was too late.
Sander Cohen, whose favorite hobby is encasing people in plaster and posing them as statues.
And both of them are outstripped in terms of atrocity by Dr. Sofia Lamb, the polar opposite of Andrew Ryan who started a cult dedicated to her daughter, the first little sister bonded successfully to a big Daddy, the player character. She starts by mind controlling you to shoot yourself in the head, in front of her daughter (who is about, oh, eight and conditioned to bond with you), and only goes downhill from there.
Andrew Ryan, meanwhile, started an elitist society where everyone would be free to express themselves how they pleased. Aside from some obvious taboos (murder, rape, theft, etc.), everyone was free to use their lives how they wanted, to create or explore and experiment in any way possible. He was rabidly set on his ideals of free will and self-reliance, thoroughly denouncing the loss of personal liberties and calling anyone that relied on others a "Parasite". These lofty ideals lasted until things stopped going his way. Then he became a tyrant to rival the worst dictators in history. A brief list of his (highly hypocritical) Moral Event Horizons:
He started sending people that criticized him to Sinclair's Solutions, a privatized prison made specifically to make people "disappear".
He approved of the use of young girls in horrible experiments that turned them into freakish abominations of nature (even he was disturbed by them, but never thought of stopping the procedures).
He had a woman killed because her songs mocked him and made the people realize that Rapture was just as unfair and crappy as the world they had left. Remember him defending freedom of speech? "A place where the artist would not fear the censor...."
After the orphaned girls were unable to meet the demand for Little Sisters, he started kidnapping the daughters of Rapture's residents. And there's plenty more that could be added to this list.
He had a terrifying amusementpark built, in order scare children into staying in Rapture, rather than going to the surface.
It becomes clear that Ryan doesn't care about the freedom of his own people, and his 'ideals' are paper-thin. Rapture is a trophy for himself to prove to everyone that he could make the perfect world away from the government that hounded him, and by God he won't let those greedy citizens ruin his achievement!
Fontaine also qualifies. As impressive as his schemes may be, he is the man mainly responsible for Rapture's fall to madness. For starters, Fontaine is the one who actually started producing Little Sisters under the guise of orphanage. And while Suchong may have been responsible for Jack's condition, Fontaine was the one who ordered it.
In Bioshock 2, Eleanor Lamb can potentially become this in two of the game's endings, and can be averted from this fate in the other two endings, by the choices the player makes in saving or harvesting the Little Sisters, and also if he allows her to extract Subject Delta's ADAM if he has saved one Little Sister and harvested one Little Sister.
Even the Harvest Moon series has a Complete Monster in the form of Gelwein, the antagonist of Rune Factory Frontier. A scientist banished from the Imperial Research Center in Norad for his theories on using Runes for powering weapons of mass destruction, Gelwein attempts to continue his research by draining the Life Energy from a sentient floating island, condemning the island's sentience to a slow, torturous death in the process. When told that the floating island could, if completely drained of its energy, fall out of the sky and crush an entire town's worth of innocent people underneath it, he smugly says that it's not his problem.
It's even worse after he kidnaps Mist and uses her energy to power the giant rune that makes him invincible. Of course, rescuing Mist and the maidens' song that completely turns this power against him is the game's Crowning Moment of Awesome.
In the Zone of the Enders series, Nohman Ridley, the leader of the extremist Martian faction called BAHRAM. He causes countless destruction in the name of freeing Mars and has no qualm about sending his minions to death in order to achieve his goals. Then, it is later revealed that not only does Nohman not care about Mars' independence at all but also wants to wipe out the entire solar system with the Aumaan.
Even if one takes madness induced by the Metatron into account, it's clear that Ridley is a power-hungry madman who will stop at nothing to achieve his ambition, as shown when he sent Dingo and his teammates on a suicide mission just so he can eliminate competition for the leadership in BAHRAM. Note that this particular incident happened before Anubis and Jehuty were made.
On the Earth's side, we have Zephyr, the Mad Scientist. Willing to do anything to gain recognition for his research on Metatron, he uses children in lethal experiments to develop the mindflow system, which subdues the will of a pilot to enhance the performance of orbital frame. This system works better with children, making them ideal for soldiers. Only two of the children, Pharsti and Vale, he used for his experiment manage to survive and run away, setting the plot of Fist of Mars in motion.
No one wants to mention Ned Noachim? This guy takes sheer pleasure in depriving a hospital of life-saving medicine, watching an entire city burn, and holding three orphans and an orphanage hostage with explosives, among other horrific things.
Religious zealot and manipulative narcissist Dahlia Gillespie from the first Silent Hill game. She tortures her seven-year-old daughter for years and impregnates her with an Eldritch Abomination and then burns her alive because she thinks it'll get her brownie points with God. Worse, Wish House indicates Alessa isn't the only child she's tortured to see her dream come true, only the one who suffered the most.
Luther Stickwell (a.k.a. "The Creeper") from The Suffering: Ties That Bind. Pimp, serial killer, paedophile, homophobe, murderous ghost... honestly, what can you say about a character that bonded three prostitutes to his stomach and turned them into Combat Tentacles? And of course, there was that one line: "Remember, blood's the best lubricant!"
Copperfield the Slavehunter: besides his obsessive hunting of runaway slaves and their innocent ancestors, it's revealed that his hounds are starved before a hunt so that runaways will be horribly mauled or eaten alive when found.
Alhazad from Wild ARMs 1. Lets look at the list: Arranged several inhabitents of a town to be abducted so he could test his parasite that horrifically mutates any living thing into a mindless monster; Sending the mutated citizens back to their town so they could slaughter everyone except a young, blind girl (who only surived because Zed protected her and took her under his wing; Threatening to let the same parasite, which he now affectionately calls the "Demon Seed", loose on a village almost entirely inhabited by orphaned children unless the party hands over a MacGuffin; Manages to infect both a young Wanderer and a puppy with the Demon Seed, forcing the party to kill them both; And finally, it turns out that he's the one who turned Lady Harkan into a Demon. Not because he was ordered to, but because he had a fondness for her. Even the resident omnicidalEldritch Abomination was less vile then Alhazad in that at least she did what she did because she believed destroying stuff was her destined role in the cosmos. Alhazad did all those atrocities for the lulz. In fact, he may very well be the single most vile villain in the entire series. (Though Kartikeya certainly comes close)
To put things in perspective, in the remake Cecilia, a sweet, kind Friend to All Living Things, admits that Alhazad is the only enemy she's ever fought with an angry heart. That is how bad he is.
Kartikeya of Wild ARMs 5. Although he initially appears to be an average Psycho for Hire, it's revealed later via flasbacks that he shot Greg's 5-year-old son and his wife for trying to protect Greg for no real reason other than it was a fun way to play with his new ARM. His reason for attacking Greg and then letting him live after murdering his family? Again, just for the fun of it.
Giorgios Geld from the Downloadable Content of Valkyria Chronicles, a game otherwise known for giving all of its antagonists at least a few redeeming qualities. This guy is a ruthless war criminal who likes using civilians as shields to get away from the line of fire, and torturing prisoners to death just for fun. The game's backstory reveals that one of his victims was Frederick, Captain Varrot's lover during the First European War, and the usually calm and collected Eleanor goes out of her way and risks her whole career to get her revenge on him. Only a well-timed call-out from Largo keeps her from killing Geld in cold blood... though this doesn't save the rat bastard's life, as Prince Maximillian, in a prime example of Even Evil Has Standards, has Geld court-marshalled and executed for his atrocities.
Valkyria Chronicles II ups the ante with Baldren Gassenarl, the scion of the Gassenarl family, a noble house who is using the dissent and Fantastic Racism among Gallia's nobility to dethrone Archduchess Cordelia and take Gallia's throne for themselves. Already at the start of the game, Baldren and his bunch of terrorists are seen happily slaughtering their way through defenseless Darcsen villages in the name of "racial purity"... and it gets worse when their revolution actually succeeds and Baldren, upon discovering that his father Gilbert didn't really believe all the racial superiority crap he was spouting, and was just using it as a front for his own power trip, murders him in cold blood and takes the power for himself, starting even more ruthless anti-Darcsen campaigns. Oh no, he's not done yet: at the end of the October mission, Baldren orders a group of Darcsen workers and civilians to be buried alive in the ragnite mines along with Squad G, leaving them to die a horrible death if not for Cosette and her Epiphany Therapy. The game might be Lighter and Softer than the first, but the same can't be said of the villains, apparently.
Hell, with the possible exception of Dirk, every Gassenarl qualifies to some degree. InitialBig Bad Gilbert casually manipulated over half of Gallia's nobility into becoming a howling, bloodthirsty lynch mod/army, and doesn't even believe his own lies. All he cares about is taking the throne of Gallia for himself. Audrey is a fanatical follower of a religion that worships the setting's resident omnicidalEldritch Abominations, and considers brutally oppressing and murdering Darcsesns to be a way of life. As for Dirk, he comes dangerously close to this when he brutally murders Juliana, but is arguably saved due to the revelation near that the end that he's actually Brainwashed and Crazy.
The Xenosaga series gives us Dr. Dmitri Yuriev. A man who created an entire army of clones of his own child and then sent them off to battle a deity, knowing that doing so would likely cause a reaction that would incinerate an entire planet, children, innocents, and combatents alike. He was already planning to use this genocide as political leverage to increase his own power. He held back one of those clones, though not out of mercy. No, he planned to use that one to assassinate any of the boys he grew up with as brothers who might survive and then take over his body in order to continue living forever. And let's not forget that once he finally took over the body of said clone, he used that appearance to get close to a very sweet girl who trusted that clone implicitly, and then shot her in the stomach. And then went on to murder an entire starship's crew, civilians and all.
Pigma Dengar from Star Fox is a (literal) swine, a former member of the original Star Fox, alongside protagonist Fox's father James McCloud and Peppy Hare in his young days, betrayed his comrades and unit resulting in the death of James... just for profit. After this he becomes a member of mercenary for hire group (and Star Fox rival) Star Wolf, under contract by Andross to destroy the new Star Fox team. As the player fights them, Pigma shows no sign of remorse whatsoever for doing what he did and even revels in the idea of killing the second generation as well as finshing what he started with Peppy... all while getting a big fat check. After Star Fox 64 and Venom's fall, apparently this guy is so bad that even Star Wolf, who run on their own code of mercenary honor, find him disgusting and expel him. Pigma goes on to possibly sell out his entire species and star system to the hive like Aparoids in Star Fox Assault (although its implied that he had absolutely no intention of actually siding with the Aparoids so much as sell one of their core memories to make a profit, if the ending cutscene of the Fichina mission is anything to go by.), only to be taken over himself. Although his physical form ceases to exist after Assault, his spirit lives on to continually torment Star Fox and anyone involved in it. He's a total, snout-nosed monster in every sense of the word and no one likes him.
He also spouts the most disturbing line in the entire series. "Daddy screamed reeeaaal good before he DIED!".
Pigma is also a Large Ham (pun intended) and is a good example of how a character can be occasionally amusing yet still remain a Complete Monster.
General Shears from the Adventures tie in manga "Farewell Beloved Falco" also qualifies. For one thing, he deceived the Star Fox team into attacking Katt's team by claiming they were Androssian rebels, when in reality he basically wanted to have them killed by Star Fox in order to silence them after they ended up acquiring some data he didn't want leaked: Namely, the fact that he and his research facility intended to clone Andross and not simply recreate his technology. After it became apparent that Star Fox did not stop them, he then ordered the Golas to kidnap someone who comes near the base (in this case Slippy), and chuckles dementedly at the thought of having a hostage. He then attacks Fox when he manages to uncover the cloning process.
Baron Alexander from Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Not only in flashbacks show him capturing human and animals to extract Vitae through torture but also manipulated Daniel into kidnapping villagers and murdering them.
Curtis Blackburn from Killer7. His first appearance is a cutscene in which he kills a prostitute in his car before walking into an office and killing every person in it for no apparent reason. Then you find out he killed one of the player characters and controls the female half of the black market for orphans (who're used for organ harvesting). Next, Curtis gets revenge on his partner (who controlled the male half) for cutting into his orphans... by raping and killing his wife in front of their son, killing his children, and showing him his daughter's severed head before killing him. And that's before you find out what he does to the girls he steals. This game is messed up.
One of the worst Monsters in this game is the real Alex Mercer. Not only does he brag about making a deadly virus 10x deadlier, when asked how he felt about his work and the human test subjects involved, he replied, "I wasn't being paid to feel". Even worse, when he was cornered by Blackwatch agents at Penn Station, he decided to unleash the Blacklight Virus on Manhattan, resulting in the deaths of over 10 million people in a truly callous act of Taking You with Me, even though he knew his own sister was in the city at the time. The man-eating virus itself is arguably less repulsive. It's almost a shame that he's already dead so you can't kill him yourself.
It really puts things in perspective when that man-eating virus itself is disgusted at what the real Alex Mercer did.
Jon Irenicus. Shadows of Amn starts with his torturing the Player Character, and continues with a tour of his dungeon where you find out that he has killed two of your party members from the previous game and cut one of them apart while making your innocent little sister watch, and keeps people floating in jars in perpetual pain and madness, and stuff like that. One reviewer at Amazon.com gave the game an extremely negative review after only playing this part and quitting in disgust, saying that Irenicus "defines evil". And Irenicus does all this with complete indifference. He doesn't enjoy, justify or regret it. He just has no regard for the suffering of others whatsoever. Even his Freudian Excuse is something he only got after already trying to leap the Moral Event Horizon (although those initial crimes seem tame to the player compared to his others, as we don't get to see what would actually happen if he killed the Tree of Life). His former people and most of the playable characters also think of him very much in Complete Monster terms. The fact that he is made to appear as an unbeatable, irresistible inevitability that your character is helpless against only adds to the desire to finally destroy him.
Ares is not just the God of War: he's the God of Offensive Warfare, meaning he embodies the practices of slaughtering, burning, raping and pillaging the enemy. Simply put, Ares is the horrors of war made flesh. He attacks Athens for no other reason than to prove he could. And before the game's story even began, he tricked Kratos into murdering his own family, just to make Kratos more reliant on him. This ended up biting off a good-sized chunk of his ass. He does try to justify his actions, but somehow Kratos isn't impressed.
Ares: I was... trying to make you... a great... warrior.
Kratos: You succeeded. * stabs Ares through the chest*
Ghost Of Sparta gives as Erinys. From Gaia's description it is said that she is an evil given to life. She also make a perfect Kick the Dog moment when she interrogates one unfortunate Spartan about the whereabouts of Kratos. And after he tells her what he knows (which is that he honestly has no clue), she gruesomely disembowels him with her bare hands.
Lieutenant Bella and Cavik Toth from Jedi Starfighter. They drop bioweapons on a town filled with civillians, and even when the test is successful Bella still tries to level the city purely because she enjoys, failing only because Reti and Adi intervene. She also violently threatens her subordinates. Toth, meanwhile, kills his aids with the THX weapon simply because production is behind schedule, and develops weapons to use against the clones, testing them against innocents. Nym's aid describes him as a ruthless monster. If the player doesn't gain satisfication taking these guys down they simply have no soul.
Paulie Franchetti's portrayal in The Darkness sends Jackie on a suicide mission to kill a business rival because Jackie starts questioning the way he does business. Jackie finds the guy already dead, a video of Paulie explaining why Jackie has to die, and a bomb set to go off when he arrives. When Jackie survives, Paulie blows up the orphanage where Jackie grew up with a bazooka, and murders Jackie's girlfriend Jenny in front of him.
The Darkness itself counts, since it MAKES you watch him kill Jenny by restraining you during the scene, after which it has itself a good laugh.
Probably has to be this much of an asshole for the game's protaganist, an anti hero/noble demon mafia hitman in a symbiotic relationship with an actual demon, to gain any sympathy.
To be fair, the video game version of Jackie is generally a decent guy, aside from his life as a hitman. His comic book version, however, is almost as much of a monster as the guys he fights.
Most villains from the Warcraft games are well intentioned extremists, fallen heroes or corrupted in some way. The exception is Gul'dan, a power-hungry orc who voluntarily corrupted his people into a bloodthirsty horde which he secretly controls, planned the draenei genocide and brought the orcs into Azeroth so they could trigger two wars. He also created Garona as a "breeding experiment" between an orc soldier and a female draenei prisonner, after what she was magically aged, tortured and mind controlled into becoming his personnal assassin. Finally, he betrayed the Horde to follow his own goals, which caused the defeat of the orcs. That he died like a bitch trying to make a Badass Boast when he was bleeding to death is all the more satisfying.
He was so evil that his skull corrupted everything around it
Another example would be the leader of the Quilboar, Charlga Razorflank, who moved most of her people to Razorfen Kraul, across the street from the former capital, Razorfen Downs, pretty much so the Scourge (yes that Scourge) could move in. The results include the already deceased in Downs being brought back and having the city flooded with Scourge zombies. Made worse by the fact everybody of the race that doesn't serve her/the Scourge already is completely oblivious to this and serve blindly as soldiers.
Doctor Theolen Krastinov in Scholomance. He doesn't get much characterisation, but what he does is basically this (told by a ghost):
Finally, he came. He introduced himself as Doctor Theolen Krastinov. We came to know him as the Butcher. We finally understood what the screams were from. The Butcher exposed us to pain that we did not know existed. He used us in countless experiments to devise a plague. The days turned to weeks. We would have died on that first day had it not been for that cruel bastard keeping us alive through magical means. The Butcher would speak of "the blood of innocents", and his dark master, "Kirtonos". Of how he must appease his master. Finally, the beast was done with his experiments. We had been drained of all life. Our spirits shattered. The sweet embrace of death was upon us and we welcomed it with open arms. But in his infinite cruelty, the Butcher revived us from death's door. We were to be kept alive and thrown to his ravenous ghouls. He laughed as he watched the fiends devour our flesh.
The Lotus Assassins in Jade Empire. They basically take political prisoners, kill them in the most painful way possible, and make golems out of their souls. The more painful the death, the better the golem.
And they're just the Mooks, it turns out. They were once a peaceful order of monks dedicated to the spiritual development and protection of the Emperor...until Death's Hand got put in charge. they are put through extreme Training from Hell like being beat with iron rods to dull their notion of pain, put in isolation until they go mad, and pitted against each other in ways that make the Sith look sane. (Was BioWare planning to make Korriban look like this, only to SquickGeorge Lucas?) It looks like Death's Hand was making a play against the Emperor...only to find out the Emperor not only has given his blessing to all this crap, he's undead, being kept on this plane by the enslavement of a goddess, and clearly out of is skull.
Captain Sen, who, as a child, lets a young boy drown to prevent anyone from telling about him pushing him in, and later goes on to be a highly unethical military leader, not caring about an arsonist burning down poor people's houses until she attacks wealthier individuals, along with other crimes over the years.
Zoran Lazarevic is this in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. The first time you see this guy up close, he shoots Jeff, Elena's wounded cameraman, whom Nate has been trying to carry to safety for an entire level. Later on, when Nate tries to pull a Put Down Your Gun and Step Away by taking one of Lazarevic's men captive, he simply laughs and shoots the hostage in the head after giving a speech about how Hitler, Stalin, Genghis Khan and Pol Pot were all "great men" because they "had the will to do what other men would not." It never occurred to him that those "other men" weren't murderous psychopaths. His Karmic Death at the hands of the Guardians is immensely satisfying.
Oh, but it gets better. In the second game, you learn that Aristide not only caused the debacle with Alma through her own stupidity and arrogance, but was also part of two other highly unethical projects to make Armacham a fortune. Project: Harbinger involved tricking ill people into a secret research facility where all sorts of experiments were performed on them in order to turn them into psychic commanders, a duplication of what had been achieved with Paxton Fettel. Every single one of the test subjects turned into a raving, feral monsters, barely human and completely devoid of sanity. Then there was Project: Paragon, a program that created a false elementary school that pulled in children with the most promising mental and physical attributes. These children were fed chemicals to induce psychic abilities and enhance mental prowess, and routinely sedated and taken into an underground lab to be subjected to tests, all in the hope of producing future commanders for Project: Harbinger. Oh, and she Kick the Dog shoots Lt. Stokes for trying to stand in her way at the end of the second game.
Ōkami has Demon Lord Ninetails, who over the course of the game demonstrated exceptional talent as a Manipulative Bastard, killed and impersonated a beloved priestess, tried to leave Ammy to be eaten by the Water Dragon after he was done using her, and murdered Queen Himiko. And, while we don't see anywhere near as much of its actions, Ninetails' boss, Yami may also qualify: it exterminated the entire civilization of the Celestials, and the Bestiary basically describes it as the essence of all evil.
The GLA in Command & Conquer Generals commit all sorts of atrocities throught both games. The worst offenders are the ending of the 1st GLA campaign and in the first USA mission.
To elaborate further: In addition to committing all those atrocities throughout their campaign (slaughtering entire villages, stealing UN humanitarian shipments, using chemical weapons), at the end of their campaign then capture the Baikonur Cosmodrome and uses captured Soyuz rocket to launch a biological warhead at a major chinese city, leveling it to the ground and killing hundreds of innocent people. At the beginning of the American campaign, the Americans storm through Baghdad and defeat most of their forces. To slow them down, they drop 9 scuds missiles loaded with anthrax on the Bazzar in Baghdad, where many people are conversing, killing an unknown number of civilians and destroying a large portion of their own city.
SS-Commandant Colonel Kurt Dierker in The Saboteur. He tortures Sean's best friend, then shoots him multiple times in the head while Sean watches, and gleefully talks about the things he learned from his father, a butcher, while fondly caressing various implements of torture. Other characters mention that Dierker is known to skin his victims after he's done torturing them. At the end of the game, after Sean has helped destroy the Nazi leadership in Paris and destroyed the Doppelseig factory, he finally tracks down Dierker at the Eiffel Tower, where Dierker has been executing his subordinate officers for failing him and forcing others to commit suicide. Sean then has the choice of executing Dierker himself or sparing him, while the drunken Dierker rants on and on. If Sean shoots him, it's a great Shut Up, Hannibal! moment. If Sean doesn't shoot him, Dierker sneers at him and throws himself off the Eiffel Tower anyway.
Nicole Horne, the villain of the first Max Payne. She makes a super soldier serum, and, when the project was canceled because of the nasty side effects it had (killing people or driving them insane), she simply continued it unauthorized and tried to market it while knowing full well about said side effects. She has the protagonist's wife and baby girl murdered just to keep her secret safe (even though Michelle's extent of her knowledge about the project was that it was "something about Vikings"), and when Max finally confronts her in the final mission, she actually tries to justify it by saying that it was necessary and inevitable. Unsurprisingly, no tears were shed when she met her fiery demise at Max's hands.
The Assassins Creed series has its share of these. While it seems that nearly everyone you murder as an Assassin is an Asshole Victim, most of them are True Believers in the Templar cause to make a better world through removing humanity's free will. Some of them, however, stand out for their unnecessary and premeditated evil.
Assassin's Creed I gives us Majd Addin. While most of Altaïr's targets think that their actions will be good for the world, that is not the case for this psycho. Majd Addin, the de facto leader of Jerusalem who regularly orders and personally carries out mass executions of innocent people, openly admits on his deathbed that he doesn't think it will help anyone, he does it because he finds it fun.
Rodrigo Borgia from Assassins Creed II, who would later (in Real Life) become Pope Alexander IV. He orders the execution of not just Ezio's father, but his two brothers (one of whom is a child.) When Ezio confronts him later he gleefully admits that he didn't really need to kill the brothers as well, he just wanted to prove a point. He's also described as being a ruthless psychopath and an incestuous pedophile during the target briefing, with one particular visual provided of him standing in the middle of a field of corpses, smiling happily. Also, Ezio maintains a pretty professional attitude most of the time- except with Borgia, whom he calls a bastard and beats the living shit out of with his bare hands. Thankfully Karma gives old Rodrigo a rather nasty kick in the balls: apart from the vicious beating, he finds out that not only is he not the prophet (every one of his crimes were commited in the belief that he was) but that his sworn enemy was the prophet. And he only lived thanks to said enemy's mercy. Damn.
Marco Barbarigo in Assassins Creed II has a hit ordered on his own bodyguard, Dante Moro, just so he can have access to his wife. When Dante survives being stabbed in the head, Marco takes advantage of the resulting brain damage by having him annul his own marriage- and the next visual on the target briefing shows Dante standing guard at the bedroom door while his ex-wife is dragged away by Marco.
In the modern era, Warren Vidic is the face of the modern day Templars as far as the protagonist and the player are concerned, and is an expert at manipulating people to his cynical ends. He forces Animus subjects to work until the "bleeding effect" literally drives them to insanity and suicide. He coerced his assistant Lucy into working for him by arranging for his higher-ups to order her killed and then "saving" her from it (and it's later revealed that even this was a sham for Desmond's benefit and he'd previously preyed on her emotional isolation to recruit her as a Templar). At one point he used brainwashing to create a Manchurian Agent for the purpose of infiltrating the Assassins and learning the location of all of their Dens, at which point Vidic ordered them killed down to the last woman and child. He does this unrepentantly in the service of Templar ascendancy and their ultimate goal of complete control over the will of mankind.
In Rapelay, the main character is a Complete Monster even by H-Game standards. After being arrested for molesting the young girl Aoi, he makes it out of prison thanks to his politician father, and executes his vengeance by continuously molesting and raping Aoi along with her mother and her underage sister.
In Planescape: Torment, practically every character you meet is fleshed out and given a reason for their actions. The crime boss? Terrified of death. The old hag? Insane, but desperate for companionship. Hardly commendable, but understandable. The Big Bad? He just wants to be left alone. The worst character however, is yourself. Specifically, a previous incarnation, who was willing to do anything to succeed in getting his memory back. You'll spend a lot of the game stumbling across his machinations, which are both thoughtful and impressive...but he is just such a phenomenally arrogent, ruthless, cold, flat out evil bastard, his comeuppance at the end is very satisfying, especially if you are smart enough to force him to merge with you.
To elaborate, the Practical Incarnation has a personal agenda and he doesn't care what he has to do to fulfill it, and shows no remorse whatsoever. Bully people? He'll do that, no problem. Deceive someone in order to make them an indentured servant? You bet. Lead the one person who seems to love you into, essentially, an ambush? You notice a pattern here? The very best thing that can be said about him is that he doesn't seem to do things For the Evulz. Thankfully, his plans to resurrect himself by absorbing and overwhelming the main character's current incarnation come to naught (assuming you beat him, that is).
It's also possible to play as one of these - the dialog options allow many courses of action, some truly horrible, and the game rewards sadistic mental cruelty more than random violence. Players taking an evil path may well end up hating themselves.
Karras in Thief 2 - Let's see... the guy is abducting the homeless people and turning them into mindless automatons, in a bid to commit mass murder by using the servants to eradicate all organic life in The City.
Another lovely character that embodies this trope is The Hag (also called the Grey Lady) from Thief: Deadly Shadows, a hideous creature who was once a human woman named Gamall, one of the Keepers. By using magic, she violently steals the skin from her victims and uses it to disguise herself.
Bob Page from Deus Exinvents a nano-robot to simulate a virulant infection and uses it to painfully kill as many people as possible, murders his non-Dragon mooks if they fail him (or if they don't, for that matter), uses nukes - when possible - to deal with his foes when his troops don't work, and generally tries to cause as much death, destruction and chaos as he possibly can in his bid for godhood. "Let it spill over into the schools and churches, let the bodies pile up in the streets. In the end, they'll beg us to save them."
Dr. Silas Archer of Invisible War as well...he's a Templar plant and therefore anti-biomodification. He acts as the headmaster for a school of biomodified young girls. Needless to say, he planned to murder the most gifted students of the school.
The first murder was a complete accident. He was trying to rape the victim. The second murder was for the fun of it, as well as convincing Namatame to do the rest of the kidnappings.
He also does appears to show remorse for his actions when he learns that Dojima still considers him his partner, so he's not a complete monster. Doesn't make his actions any less repulsive.
Quaestor Verus from Baten Kaitos Origins qualifies big time. Acting under the guise of a Reasonable Authority Figure, he coldly masterminds the plot to become the Emperor by taking advantage of everyone else. Before the game's events, he uses a just born baby Sagi (whom he may have fathered through rape) in a lethal experiment that fuses pieces of dead evil gods with living beings. During the game, he orders Shanath (a massiveJerkass in his own right) to cross the Moral Event Horizon by taking Sagi's mother Gena's wings off in the public election speech...just to smear on the reputation of someone getting in his way. Later on, just as Baelheit is about to consider a Heel Face Turn, Quaestor Verus shows up, murders him, and starts gloating about all his deeds. It's incredibly satisfying to see Verus' own machina turn against him and devour him alive.
Wiseman. While its (?) values that lead to the attempt at one of the creepiest Assimilation Plots of the age may be incomprehensible, there are some things that just lack any excuse - like killing everyone in Naos. And making matters even worse, it is heavily implied that Wiseman was behind Quaestor Verus' actions.
Mount & Blade allows you to become one of these yourself. For example, you can force a village, low on money, to pay quite a lot of money to their lord. And if you avoid the lord that gave you that mission for long enough, you can then keep the money, leaving the village with no money to pay off their angry lord. Then, you can go back, slaughter them all and take what little stuff they have left, then burn the village to the ground.
The lords themselves aren't too nice either. One of the missions you can get is to sufficiently piss off another faction to get the two at war. Because they are bored of peace.
Quest for Glory's Bruno may have gone from being merely an unpleasant thief in QG1 to a complete monster in QG5. The player character meets him near the beginning (without recognition), and the Paladin detects diabolical evil in him.
In Starcraft, Kerrigan's hated instructor, Lieutenant Rumm. He forced the young girl to use her exceptional psionic powers by injecting a kitten with a tumor-causing chemical, and gave her the option of destroying the kitten's tumor or euthanizing it. Not willing to fall to his demands, Rumm threatend to shoot the kitten himself. Still uncompliant, Rumm decided not to shoot and left the kitten to die slowly and painfully. Taking more drastic measures, he brought in her father (who had become brain-damaged as a result of Kerrigan's accidently unleashing her psionic powers) in an adjacent cell to hers and threatened to inject him with the same chemical if she didn't use her psionic powers. When she still refused, threatening to use the power to kill herself and her father, Rumm forced her to be neural resocialized (a form of brainwashing technology used to enforce obedience and shape new memories), turning her into a loyal puppet of the Terran Confederacy. Even after the mind-rape, he continued to mentally torture her for over a year. He finally gets his comuppance in the end when the pre-infested Kerrigan (i.e. Queen of Blades) finds him and throws him around with her reawakened psionic powers and fries his brain.
Let's not forget her "creator", Emperor Arcturus Mengsk. You can feel for a guy who had his home world nuked by the Confederates and his family whacked by the girl who would later become his trusted lieutenant, but does that really justify siccing the zerg on Tarsonis (which, unlike the military outpost of Antiga Prime, had billions of civilians inhabiting it) and feeding them said trusted lieutenant because she voiced objections to it? Even afterwards, he throws every political dissident he can get his hands on into complexes like New Folsom and squanders funding which could have been used keeping fringe worlds like Agria safe from the zerg assault to hunt down small-time resistance factions and "has-been" rebels like Jim Raynor. It's also very heavily implied in the mission Piercing the Shroud that he's on the payroll of the Dark Voice, meaning that he may be WILLINGLY helping the DV bring about the apocalypse. Mercifully, due to the thorough work of Matthew Horner and the rest of Raynor's Raiders, Mengsk gets a measure of comeuppance when the recordings of Confederate Adjutant 23-46, which include his motive rant of self-aggrandizement and power lust and his orchestration of the Tarsonis Massacre, are broadcast throughout Dominion space.
The four-part comic Frontline series also had Dr. Stanley Burgess, whom the comic's editor considered to be the only two amoral characters (the other being the sadistic wrangler, Randall) in the entire series. A sadistic Terran Dominion scientist, he personally oversaw the neural resocialization of Jin-ho Lim, a terran of Asian ethnicity who opposed the Terran Dominion but was conscripted into the Dominion Marine Corps. After the operation, Stanley ordered the now docile Lim to kill his wife and fellow Terran Dominion opposer, Anna, and he complied by shooting her in the face without a moment's hesitation. He also was responsible for the creation of the terran/Protoss Gestalts by implanting the organs of captured Protoss into terrans controlled by neural conditioning and neural inhibitors. His project came to an end after one of his subjects, Gestalt Zero, was freed from his neural inhibitors by a dying Protoss and stabbed him to death, ironcally echoing one his previous comments "I should warn you...this is probably going to hurt."
Tom Hawkins from Kate Lockwell's origin story also qualifies. He murders an entire colony with sadistic glee, and when Lockwell refuses to give him evidence of his crimes, he dumps her friend (whom she only just reconcilled with) into space, killing him. He's pretty much the reason she's the Only Sane Women we see in the game; before she bought all the dominion propaganda hook line and sinker.
The biggest example is the Dark Voice. In the Bad Future he has three species wiped out to mold the universe in his own twisted imagery, and in the current future he's not only responsible for the destruction of the Xel'Naga, but also for every single atrocity that the Zerg commit. And he only shows up in one level.
Conrad Marburg in Alpha Protocol. He's part of a conspiracy to destabilize the world by funding terrorists so an arms manufacturer that's seeing profit loss for refusing to change it's business strategy with the end of the cold war can simply have a new cold war to thrive in. He puts Mike into a Sadistic Choice where he must choose between stopping the bombing that's his part of the job, or saving Madison Saint James, an innocent civilian who stumbled on the assassination contract Marburg put out on Mike and got involved just trying to warn him. To make matters worse, if the player is playing Mike as a decent guy, he and Madison have either become fast friends or have gone beyond being friends. There is no third option, and Marburg delights in taunting Mike over it. During the boss fight, if Mike kills Marburg's mooks, Marburg will freak out about it, but far from generating sympathy, it's clearly Moral Myopia at work. As a bonus, if Mike is being played as cold, professional and uncaring for others, Marburg will like him. Worst of all, although it is possible to kill Marburg, ensuring that the right condition is met can be a Guide Dang It.
In Heavy Rain, it's telling of the level of evil of some of the characters are more evil than the Oragami Killer (who himself doesn't qualify for this trope due to his backstory and personality making them an Anti-Villain):
Dr. Adrian Baker murders people by surgery while they are still alive and conscious.
Kramer and his son qualify for this: while the former covers up the murder his son has done and willing to commit murder to make sure it stays that way, the latter killed a child out of boredom.
The Taxidermist also qualifies for killing young women, stuffs them by them got into taxidermy, dresses them up, and poses them in his bedroom.
Deadly Premonition has one, and its actually not the New Raincoat Killer, Who actually has a very valid excuse for why he did what he did. No, the Complete Monster is Forrest Kaysen, the realBig Bad. This sick bastard not only manipulated the Raincoat Killer and Thomas into turning evil by exploiting their traumatic pasts, but he's also the one who orchestrated the military experiment 50 years ago that sparked the whole mess. He deliberately spread the rumors about the immortality granting Red Seeds, directly causing mass murders throughout the country, including the ones in Greenvale. And finally, there's his sickening "red tree saplings", which grow inside of young women (and its heavily implied that he "implants" the saplings in them by raping them), and when they fully sprout, the woman completely withers into a dissected husk. Finally, when his latest target withers right in front of her husband, he laughs maniacally about it, even after the husband commits suicide. And when he realized that their son had seen all this, he attacks the boy, scarring him and trapping him inside a dreamworld for almost his entire life. Oh, and the reason he did all this? He was bored.
Ozwell E. Spencer is the first chronologically. He started a little company called Umbrella with his partners, a company that performed illegal and unethical genetic experiments on their fellow man in order to find the secret to immortality. He later ended up betraying both of his partners (killing one of them and leaving the other to his own devices, and not helping him when he entered financial ruin). He also endorsed the "adoption" (read: kidnapping) of several different orphans, and having them monitored at all times and indoctrinated with his own views. Many of these children later became prominent researchers in his company. He finally gets his comeuppance in his old age. Unfortunately, the one who killed him is one of the very children he experimented on, Gone Horribly Right as he is just as much of a bastard as Spencer was, and more. Allow us to introduce Complete Monster #2...
Albert Wesker. This man is, when you look at the big picture, responsible for everything bad that happens in the series' canon, and the most irredeemably evil villain in the series. A major sufferer of Chronic Backstabbing Disorder, he does not care for the well being of his "partners", and will gladly dispose of them when the time comes that they are no longer of use to him. First off, after becoming the commander of the S.T.A.R.S Alpha Team (we later learn he was planted as a Double Agent), he traps his crew inside of a secret Umbrella facility disguised as a mansion, and uses his "teammates" as test subjects for his grotesque experiments, killing more than half of them in the process. He was also partially behind the tragic backstory of William Birkin, the Big Bad of Resident Evil 2, as they were actually colleagues. Later, he finds out about Spencer manipulating and engineering him to be who he is today, and is none too pleased, killing him in the process, as well as taking down series mainstay Jill Valentine to their supposed deaths. Surviving the fall, he decides to brainwash Jill into becoming his slave, mainly being petty against his nemesis Chris Redfield. He then goes on to kill U.S. Senator Ron Davis in Degeneration after considering him a liability to his new company Tricell. Then, he decides to pit Jill against Chris just for his own amusement in watching Chris' torment in fighting his partner. Then, he betrays Excella Gionne, his then-partner and one-sided lover, in the most cruel way imaginable - calling her a failed experiment, injecting her with his Ouroboros virus, and sending her out to deal with Chris and Sheva while he escapes on his own. And his motivation for doing all of this? To becomeGod of the New World by infecting every single human on the planet with his Ouroboros virus, which will kill those with unworthy DNA and leave only the chosen few for him to rule over. When he was finally confirmed dead by Word Of God (getting burned alive in a volcano and then getting his head exploded via dual Rocket Launchers, in the most extremeNo One Could Survive That moment the series has ever seen), fans rejoiced.
Police chief Brian Irons, who accepts bribes from Umbrella, killed several people during the infection of Raccoon City (including the Mayor's daughter, who he had been put in charge of, and instead raped and killed her), and had been put on trial for sexual assault in the past.
The Father in the King's Quest IIFan Remake. OK, so Roberta Williams was NOT planning to have connections between the games' antagonists, Jane Jensen was the one who slipped in a throw-away line about a Legion of Doom in the sixth. The fanbase? Promptly grabbed it and ran, and the Father is the natural conclusion. He starts off merely as an Evil Chancellor who sets Graham up to head to Kolyma. Two of his lieutenants have taken up residence there (one of which had been holding Valanice captive out of petty spite and had killed other women who had aroused her ire). Graham, being Graham, is able to dodge their traps and even helps convince one to leave. After returning home with Valanice, Graham exposes the Evil Chancellor who abruptly goes One-Winged Angel, levels a deadly curse, and vanishes. The flash-forward scene during the Air Gem test has his showing up at Graham's darkest hour to gloat, the Fanon dialogue indicating that he had another of his mooks kidnap and enslave Graham's kid for sixteen years, set the three-headed dragon on Daventry to ruin it, and then forced Graham to sacrifice his remaining child to it. The next part of the curse drops Graham with heart failure at a moment of triumph, and the last gets a Prophecy Twist, thankfully. Thing is, he really doesn't have it in for Graham per se. Graham just happens to be standing between him and some leftover power from Daventry's first king.
From Red Dead Redemption, Dutch van der Linde. He is implied to have been a Robin Hood-esque, Chaotic Good figure in the past, but by now, he is a deranged, psychopathic, selfish man whose first appearance sees him shoot an innocent woman in the head during a bank robbery for no real reason. He also uses the suffering of the Native Americans into convincing them into becoming easy mooks for his gang, committing massive atrocities all while Dutch claims he's doing it for an "ideal". Allende is also a Complete Monster; despite being from peasant stock himself, the peasants under his rule are poor, starving and constantly brutalised and bullied by his army, which he also uses to kidnap peasant girls so he can have his way with them. Like Dutch, it is even more aggravating in that he says they need to be ruled by such a draconian government. Edgar Ross, while it can be argued that he is a complete monster, is more of a very brutal Knight Templar.
Well, the main page clearly states; it is possible for Knight Templar to be a complete monster. Ross qualifies, no doubt.
From the stranger missions:
Randall Forrester, a deranged rural freak who kidnaps citizens and travellers to the nearby town of Armadillo and kills them and eats them. Men, women, children. No exceptions.
Mario Alcalde, a pimp who beats his whore Eva, then, once you buy her off him and release her, tracks her down and kills her in a drunken rage.
Depending on your interpretation of her character, Clara La Guerta, who is a pregnant girl who says she was impregnanted by her employer, Harold Thornton, then thrown out on the street with her child. You go to get some money from Harold to support her, but he denies it, challenging you to a duel. He dies. Upon giving her the money, she is clearly distraught at the news of Harold's death. A few days later, you see Mrs Thornton. Clara apparently turned up to laugh at Harold's funeral, and Mrs Thornton casts doubt on the whole story. Thus, the possibility of Clara being a deranged, lying, vengeful bitch who manipulated you into killing an innocent man for no reason whatsoever is a very real one. Her status as a minor Karma Houdini makes this even worse.
A power-hungry psycho soldier sometimes referred as "Dictator", M. Bison/Vega from Street Fighter series will do anything he can to conquer the entire world by manipulating or killing the Street Fighters. Note that he committed a horrible genocide of Thunder Hawk's people, too.
Quite possibly, the For Want of a Nail character "Oni" could be this, considering that he's Akuma with nothing left of his rare moments of humanity. He's also become an Omnicidal Maniac, as well, having caused a volcano to erupt in his ending.
A few from the tactical first person shooter SWAT 4. A lot of the enemies in SWAT 4 are just petty and confused criminals, however in some of the more dramatic missions, you meet suspects who are truly vile. The best example is probably the cultists from mission 8, who plot to blow up an entire city block and kill everyone there. But that's not the worst part. No, the worst part is that they killed all of their children and buried them in a grave in their basement. There is also the North Korean paramilitaries/terrorists/special forces or whatever they are, who storm a hospital and mercilessly slaughter all the innocent patients, doctors, and hospital workers there in an attempt to kidnap a South Korean politician.
The Star Control universe has a number of examples.
The Dnyarri are race of toad-like creatures with tremendous psychic abilities. They were by far the most evil race in the galaxy, before the Ur-Quan made all of them into non-sentient translators. The backstory goes to great lengths to assure you that this fate is far too good for them, having used the Ur-Quan as their own slaves, having the Ur-Quan attempt to wipe out all the other sentient races associated with them, and then genetically modifying the Ur-Quan into the two separate races that exist in the game. The one that has it's sentience turned back on is a lying slimeball who is all too aware of his evil nature but hides it as long as he feels the need to, but otherwise he's quite shameless about it. It says a lot when his mere presence causes the Ur-Quan to squirm and even a robotic race says that "IF THERE EVER WAS A DEVIL, CAPTAIN, IT WAS THE DYNARRI".
Live-A-Live's Odie Oldbright is probably the worst among Odio's incarnations in the game. He kills six martial arts masters just to show his superiority and then goes after Masaru, the main character of the chapter, since he had just previously beaten them. After Odie gloats about it, Masaru flies into a fury and proceeds to pound his face in.
While that's the worst of Odio's incarnations, the villains of the Flow chapter are possibly the worst monsters in the game. Basically they kidnap orphaned children, to turn them into Liquefied Humans (of whom you can still read their minds as they slowly melt into the liquid), all to use it as fuel for a god-robot statue. Right before the boss they have collected a pool of 60000 humans! And to drive the point home is the collective hatred conscious in that pool what acts as Odio's incarnation in this chapter and ends up shallowing them.
Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura has "Sir" Garrick Stout, the Melee master. He challenges his rival, Adkins Chambers, to a duel because he wants Adkins' betrothed, and when Chambers yielded on defeat, Stout cut his eyes out. He later ropes the player into rescuing the lady and tries to force her into marriage by offering her a blindness-curing potion. Suffice to say, giving him his comeuppance has never been so sweet, and even on an evil play-through it's hard not to kill him. Oh, and if you duel him he'll usually start by severely poisoning you (which is kinda annoying since he has the only free sample of strong poison out there). Stout is such a bastard that even the game considers double-crossing him and killing him immediately after receiving both Melee Master training and the blindness-curing potion to be the noble solution to the paired Melee/Dodge quests.
Alter Aila absolutelty thrives on Grey and Gray Morality, but still has one in the form of Red. There is literally not a single scene where he is not brutally murdering someone, viciously mocking someone, or both. And you actually have to side with this bastard if you want the Golden Ending.
Etrian Odyssey has a tendency to have villains that are either barely villains at all or Well Intentioned Extremists. However, this is not so with Olympia from the third game. She is an unrepentant murderer and liar who, before the game's story even begins, has lead countless explorers to their gruesome deaths, possibly even murdering some of them herself. In the game proper, she actually pretends to befriend you for a while, but then betrays you and leaves you to die against seemingly hopeless odds, all with a smug grin on her face. The fact that she's admittedly doing this to prevent the Deep City from being discovered does not make her actions any less repulsive.
Twisted Metal offers several examples but while characters like Sweet Tooth's driver Needles Kane are like this due to some form of mental illness, Calypso seems to fit this role in his own right. He holds an annual competition which not only endangers the lives of the participants, but the population of the battlefields themselves. As the vehicles tear their opponents and landscapes apart, Calypso only watches with a twisted grin. Then when the winner gets to make a wish, Calypso will almost always twist their words to make them suffer. The only time he ever seems to have any humanity is when he is confronted by his daughter, Amanda in 2 and Head On.
Guilty Gear gives us the sexy, powerful, and utterly cruel I-No. Here are the reasons why:
She loves torturing Dizzy. IN GGXX she pushed her off the ship a thousand feet from the air, but that didn't make her happy. When she landed on the ground in pain, I-No beat her up while she amuses herself with her screaming.
In the Drama CD's, after befriending and flirting with a teenager Ky, she watched as Gears tear his body in Rome and she left him there choking on his own blood. She was laughing in amusement. And we have to consider that Ky was fighting there to look for her, wanting to make sure that she's safe.
She just likes to pick up fights when encountering characters in her story paths. Reason? She's a troll.
Most notably, Lucien who is shaping up to be the Big Bad of the series. What did he do? Well, you, during While Guthix Sleeps, gather a group of the biggest heroes, several of which you have spent a long time in the game getting to know as people, and then Lucien kills them all. Ouch.
Sigmund also qualifies, quite possibly even worse than the above. He is a total xenophobe who wants the peaceful cave goblins dead. The first thing you see him do is try to start a war between Lumbridge and the Dorgeshuun. At one point, he even uses emotional blackmail on the character. And then it gets much, much, worse. He tries to drill a hole under the river to fall into the cave, drowning all the goblins, after that fails, he ties Zanik to train tracks in an attempt to start a war between the goblins and the dwarves. He does finally get his comeuppance with Zanik cutting off his hand to keep him from escaping with the ring of life, followed by her killing him. Not to mention he relishes killing the player just as much as he relishes killing the goblins....such as in the Chosen Commander.
There's also Lord Drakan, a vampire who took over the largest city in the world and turned it into a ghetto where he enslaved many people. The result is that the people are all want nothing more than a quick death to end their pain. Vanstrom from the same series also qualifies. The FIRST THING he does when he's introduced is trick the player into finding the Myreque, a rebellion against Drakan, for him, and then kills two members of the Myreque after all of them have been introduced and given interesting backstories.
From The House of the Dead, the Magician, the single most famous villain in the series.
There are a fair share of these gentlemen in Strange Journey. Here are some examples:
Mitra. An Evilutionary Biologist trying to find a way to induce the perfect insanity in humans. He succeeds. Through repeated testing.
Captain Jack. Mitra's human counterpart. Suffice to say the demons cursing you and the results of his experiments only help his beatdown sweeter.
Mastema. A Manipulative Bastard from Heaven who just happens to not care for his bosses at all. He manipulates an emotionally fragile woman into being his admirer, then charms her into transforming willingly into an angel so she will be completely devoted to the cause of using the Schwarzwelt to transform Earth into a World of Silence and posesses a song with Mind Rape capabilities, obliterating the human soul and leaving only a mindless shell chanting and praising God. When his plans fall apart in the Chaos Path, he completely loses it and suffers a massive Villainous Breakdown where he admits everything... and then it's time to rip him a new one.
Asura. A giant who wants to "polish" the human soul by removing anything that's not pure, undiluted aggression. Mitra's drinking buddy.
Jack's second-in-command, Ryan. The boss at least had the courtesy to be Affably Evil. After Jack dies and he's no longer under any danger, he becomes raw Neutral Evil. Gets Mind Raped into submission. And even as a fanatical zealot he's an idiot jerk.
YHWH's Dragons, the Four Seraphs (Michael, Raphael, Uriel and Gabriel) and Metatron, all Knight Templars seeking the complete submission of mankind to YHWH's will.
Serph Sheffield, from the same. A Manipulative Bastard who convinces an innocent girl he honestly cares about her (for the possibility to reach the power of God) and that the actual doctor who does give a damn about her is the actual monster. This has the interesting side effect of The End of the World as We Know It after a brutal shootout that kills virtually everybody and causes God to lash out by virtually killing off the human race.
From the Persona series, Nyarlathotep. Hooo boy. Given he is the physical incarnation of the destructive side of Humanity's psyche...
The main character in the Blood series, Caleb, started out as a sociopathic Wild West gunslinger. Then he met his beloved Ophelia, who introduces him to the satanic cult of the Cabal, and he just gets worse from there. And then he's killed by his evil god, only to come Back from the Dead and slaughter his way through every living thing he sees, laughing all the way.
Majora, from The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, not only goes into a sadistic rampage affecting several characters, but threatens to send a whole moon (albeit a relatively small one) crashing into Termina because it's FUN. He may arguably be one of the creepiest villains in children's gaming and has the mind of a sadistic child.
Zant from Twilight Princess. Before even starting his conquest of Hyrule, he turns the Twili, his own people, into monsters, and turns Midna, the real ruler of the Twili, into an imp in order to get her out of the way. When he actually takes over Hyrule, his little ultimatum for subjugation under Twilight or death for all the Hylians provides Princess Zelda with more than her fair share of grief for choosing subjugation. His most despicable act, however, has to be executing Queen Rutela in front of the other Zoras just to warn them what would happen to any who resisted Zant's rule.
Sakaki of Dot Hack GU was merely annoying and overzealous at first, but later revelations removed any kind of sympathy fans might have had for him. Specifically, the revelation that he had been manipulating and controlling AIDA behind the scenes, and that his ultimate goal was to use AIDA as mass mind control over all of humanity. But the biggest blow against him was his treatment of Atoli, who had long been one of his strongest supporters. Turns out he had met her on a suicide website, preyed on her fears about being alone and considered worthless, effectively brainwashed her into depending on him, and then Mind Raped her to bring out the power of her Epitaph. When all of his plans fail and he gets infected with AIDA himself, he then spends the first half of the final volume putting together a sadistic tournament for the sole purpose of making Haseo and the rest suffer (harming quite a few others in the process), and laughing at the pain he's causing. His comeuppance (getting the tar beaten out of him by Haseo and then PK'ed by the Azure Knights) was most satisfying indeed.
Cross Ward of Radiata Stories is a deplorable man, and in the first scene the players meet him he is instantly recognizable as a racist Jerkass. But Cross's depravity really comes to light when he leads his knight brigade to slaughter the dwarves of Earth Valley over a perceived insult (which was really more of a very caustically delivered piece of advice) from the dwarf leader. He continues acting horrible in each of the game's story branches; in the one where Jack stays with humanity and becomes a hero, Cross becomes a bitter glory hound doing everything he can to establish himself as a great knight, using the war as an excuse to build his own reputation. In the path where Jack abandons humanity and sides with the nonhumans, Cross becomes humanity's trump card instead of Jack. He uses his new influence to commit as many atrocities against the nonhumans as his position will allow, and also kidnaps Jack's sister and tortures her. A very nasty fellow.
For the amount of killing in a series, Umineko no Naku Koro ni has relatively few of these. A good deal of the antagonists are at least understandable in their motives. However, Eva-Beatrice definitely qualifies. Even Beatrice tells her that she's taking the job of being the villain over the top.
Also, if the events of EP 7 are to be believed (This IS Umineko we're talking about), Kyrie definitely qualifies, as well. It's a bit tough to come off as anything less after telling your own son that you wish he was never born, then killing him. And everyone else on the island to top it off.
EP 8 reveals that Eva is actually an aversion, her monstrosity being a product of her trying to avert the blame to her so that Ange can think she's the true culprit when in reality it was Kyrie.
One of the most vicious Complete Monsters in any video game is Clockwerk. Consumed by hatred and envy for the Cooper clan, he converted his body into soulless machinery so he could live forever and wipe out the Cooper lineage. I'll let Sly take it from here.
Sly Cooper: "Clockwerk. He was consumed with jealousy for the Cooper clan's thieving reputation. Is it inappropriate to refer to him as a monster? No, not at all. What kind of person stays alive for hundreds of years with the express intention of wiping out a rival's family line? Imagine the hatred fueling that first decision to replace his mortal body with soulless machinery. Ultimately, it did the trick. Clockwerk lived on."
Terry Higgins from True Crime New York City. Well, at first he doesn't seem so bad saving Marcus from getting shot, but then he fakes his death, gives the gangs inside information about the cops and embezzle millions of dollars, frames an innocent man, butts Marcus through events that would kill anybody, tries to get Marcus to join him in Mexico, tries to blackmail him to not arrest him, randomly fires at innocent civilians killing them and the whole reason: he SAVED MARCUS WAS SO HE COULD USE HIM TO KICK THIS PLAN INTO ACTION.
Arguably, all the hero's (himself no saint) rivals in Varicella. General Wehrkeit is a sadist who had Varicella's brother murdered at his wedding and is planning to attack his own country. Father Bonflèche is a Pedophile Priest who has been repeatedly raping the underage Prince Charles. Prince Louis and Minister Rico have been raping Princess Charlotte, a helpless inmate in a lunatic asylum. Minister Variola has been developing horrific biological weaponry, as well as drugging and raping Miss Sierra. Ironically, if you get the "happy" ending, it turns out that young Prince Charles grows up to be the biggest Complete Monster of them all, starting a ruthless war of conquest and torturing Varicella to death.
Psychic Force, given the overall Crapsack World that the setting is, has nothing less than two of them: RichardWong and Gudeath: the former is a coldly calculatingSmug Snake who treats people as nothing more than expendable pawns in his game of conquest, and is responsible, among other things, for turning Wendy's sister Chris into a combat cyborg devoted to him (or Keith), for capturing Patty and putting her into an And I Must Scream situation in order to create his ultimate weapon, and the worst would be capturing Emilio and transforms him from a Shrinking Violet into an Ax Crazy psychopath. He is never given any reason for his actions other than the fact that he thinks he's the most awesome person in the world, and everybody must therefore bow down to him and worship him like a god - granted, being able to control time itself kinda gives his A God Am I boasts some credibility. The latter is a gravity-controllingSocial DarwinistBlood Knight whose only reason for joining Wong is because he likes murdering people, taking joy in destroying his victims' loved ones and prolonging their agony as much as possible, and being part of the Army gives him the chance to do that without consequences. Setsuna might be one as well, but is arguably saved by the fact that he's trying to kill Wong, which in this case comes across as a Kick the Son of a Bitch. Or arguably not, as Setsuna himself just think of himself highly and wouldn't stand being under Wong's command, and quite possibly wouldn't steer the Army into a better force, but rather into more evil.
Others 3
Supreme Commander 2 William Gauge, After destroying the government building of the Aeon, Gauge nukes some of the city, Thalia Kael calls him out on this, and he quickly responds by launching two more nukes, them letting Thalia know that what they've done in the aeon is essentially an entire screw up
Chairman Drek from the first Ratchet & Clank game. At first, he could pass for a Well-Intentioned Extremist, since he's building a new world for his people to live on after their first world became uninhabitable, but he true nature is revealed in the final battle, where it's revealed he intentionally polluted his world and then forced his people to pay him for space on his new one, and intends to do it all over again, even though it results in the destruction of several more worlds. Even before this reveal his true nature shows, he gleefully announces he will destroy a planet because it's in the orbit he wants, and tells his foreman to completely mine other planets' resources dry just so they won't get it.
Montross from Star Wars Bounty Hunter. His first introduction shows him coldly gunning down a helpless bounty who's wanted dead or alive, simply for the pleasure of murder. As the man desperately pleads, his bounty is worth more alive. Montross replies "You're worth enough dead." Later on, while trying to beat Fett to the big prize that they're both after, he tortures Fett's non-combatant friend and mother-figure to find out the location, mortally wounding her in the process. Then he sets her entire space station to explode, hoping to kill Fett. He fails, but undoubtedly slaughters countless civilians who were on the station. Fortunately, he gets a karmic death when Jango leaves him to be ripped apart by the Banda Gora.
Most of the villains from GUN qualify. The Big Bad, Colonel Magruder, is feverishly seeking an el Dorado called Quivira, and murders or tortures anyone who gets in his way. His defining moment came in a flashback to years before the events of the game, when he came to a small homestead out in the plains belonging to a benevolent doctor who helped the nearby Apaches. When the Apache chief tells Magruder that his lust for the treasure will lead to his doom, he coldly shoots him, then beheads the doctor. When one of his own soldiers protests his actions, Magruder shoots him, too. His cruelty only worsens from there.
Magruder's right hand, Reed the preacher, is almost equally bad. The game starts with him ordering a group of barbaric renegade soldiers to slaughter an entire steamboat in order to search it for a missing artifact. Later on, he murders Jenny in front of Colton White, just to hurt him.
The Golden Sun series is noted for its surprisingly complex - if somewhat flat - characters, with the heroes making terrible mistakes during their quests and the antagonists frequently having sympathetic motives or qualities - the Proxians were desperate to save their hometown, and Lord Babi was quite a morally ambiguous character, having both Benevolent Boss moments and some which bordered on Kick the Dog, yet escaping classification ... And then the sequel - Golden Sun: Dark Dawn - gave us Blados and Chalis, two agents of the mysterious country Tuaparang. These two have no problem with kidnapping children, activating a tower that would eseentially switch off the sun and unleash hordes of monsters on the innocent populace of their world, and to top it off near the end, intending to use the king of Morgal - already a victim of their manipulations - in order to fire a powerful attack on their own Tuaparang allies using another weapon, knowing the weapon would kill him as a result. Blados is the worst of the two, since it's implied he does a lot of this just because he can, but Chalis herself is quite a ruthless, cold-hearted backstabber who may have been planning to betray her own partner, as well.
Alex could count as well. Betraying his clan, and especially his mentor, in search for the forbidden powers of Alchemy (without intending to save the world; he just wanted the power for himself)? Slaughtering an entire Tolbian army just because he could? Seducuing a woman just so he could get closer to a royal artifact, and then leaving her to die? And that's just the top of the iceburg. Note-even Blados and Chalis are wary of him.
In Bulletstorm, it's made clear the first time you see him that General Sarrano is the most unpleasant bastard in the game. Every second word out of his mouth is an obscenity or racial slur. He basically masterminded the entire plot behind the planet's backstory and takes great pride in telling you so as well as trying to make you feel bad for all the people you've killed in your quest to get to him.His status as a Karma Houdini only makes this worse.
Eckhardt in Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness is easily the most evil opponent Lara has had. He is not only a remorseless serial killer who collects alchemically altered body parts from his murder victims, he also systematically betrays and kills the other members of his Five-Bad Band to make sure his secrets remain hidden. He seems to inspire loyalty solely through fear.
Soma takes up this role in Eien No Aselia. While some of the other villains are really just as bad, he's the one that really draws out the disgust from both audience and cast.
Death Master Nybbas Obderhode/Nybbeth Obdilord from Tactics Ogre. He pretty much has no regards to the living and wasn't even loyal to his Lord (Barbatos, who was also a Complete Monster on his own), all he does was just to perfect his study in necromancy and would use ANYONE to do it, including Leonard, Zaebos or Guildus, and then having you kill these people raised from the dead. And it's later revealed that he turned his own son Debordes into this after he was killed by Barbatos, but the process was incomplete and he left him in his horrendous zombified state, with only his sister Orias to take care of him, causing her to hate him immensely. The PSP remake makes him even more monstrous when in the Chaotic route, he organized a zombie attack in Balmamusa that killed Orias, and Debordes to lead the other, never to recover. And then, it's revealed that he has another family of necromancers, all three eventually killed because of getting in Denam's way. Only one survives... the daughter Cressida, and he wastes no time to show the zombified selves of her sister, mother and future brother-in-law in front of her and tried to get her killed. Even some other monsters like Barbatos or Zaebos, who ran concentration camps for racism, pale compared to this bastard.
Dead Rising has Jo Slade. She rapes and beats women to death with her nightstick for fun.
Tyrone King in the second gameallows his zombies to be loose in the city, tries to kill Chuck, and tries to feed Katey and Stacey to the zombies right after Chuck saved his life.
Kengo the protagonist in Virgin Roster lives to cold-bloodedly seduce, defile, use and abuse women. The game doesn't allow the player to make him not rape all the women. He enjoys his life and sees what he does as his right. Remorse. What's that?
"I had the honor of cutting off your father's head and THRUSTING IT ON A SPIKE FOR ALL TO SEE!"
Jerec and Sarris are also good candidates, though perhaps not as glaring as Maw. In the second game, Jedi Outcast, there is Desann who is murderous, and has no sympathy at all.
While you don't usually expect this level of nasty from casual games, the Hidden Object GameReturn to Ravenhearst goes out of its way to showcase the evil of Charles Dalimar: a villain who'd ranked more as a Stalker with a Crush in the first Ravenhearst but has gotten much, much worse by the sequal.
Super Smash Bros. Brawl brings us Tabuu, a Silent Antagonist in his own right and the Final Boss of Adventure Mode: The Subspace Emissary. He's a cold-hearted and cruel entity residing in Subspace who enslaved the R.O.B.s, having them sacrifice themselves to detonate Subspace Bombs and send different locations across the World of Trophies to Subspace, which he later uses to form the Great Maze. He also used Master Hand as a puppet for the production of the Subspace Gunship, and nearly killed him because by the time he was finally free from his Chains of Light, he was no longer useful in his plans. What a cruel, cruel entity...
In Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening, we have Arkham. While it's implied that Arkham was actually a kind man before his obsession with the supernatural, the guy killed his wife with no remorse whatsoever and was probably going to do the same thing to Lady, his only daughter. Additionally, his Blob Monster of a One-Winged Angel is said to not be caused by his inability to control Sparda's power, but the result of the vast evil within his heart.
In the first Devil May Cry, there is Mundus. He wishes to conquer the whole world and destroy whole humanity, killed Dante's mother, and also killed Griffon just because the latter failed him! When Trish did the same, he captures her so that she could watch him kill Dante. She eventually takes the killing blast, but he doesn't care, calling her "useless scum".
And also Arius? He enslaves Dumary Island by turning it into a demonic nest, and creates a facade of creating a modern city. If that wasn't enough, he dumps Lucia, one of his creations, when she turns out to be a defect.
Molluck from Odd World. His Moral Event Horizon was serving Mudokins as food because Paramites and Scrabs became endangered. You heard me. He wanted to cause genocide just to make a profit.
Quite a few of the villains in the Knights of the Old Republic series qualify for the title. While Darth Malak just barely avoids this trope due to his dying acknowledgement that he was wrong, his right hand man Admiral Saul Karath has no such moment. He crossed the Moral Event Horizon by not only betraying the Republic but also carpet-bombing an entire planet just to prove his loyalties; and he continues sailing across it by torturing you, Carth, and Bastila regardless of how you answer his questions, just because he can.
Chuundar, meanwhile, manages to claim the title of Complete Monster without even having to join the Sith: having his brother exiled, inviting Czerka to set up shop on his home planet, and selling his own people into slavery, as well as betraying his father and leaving him to die in the forest, with his own people tricked into believing he had gone insane.
In the second game, Darth Nihilus is an Eldritch Abomination who drains the force energy of entire planets to sustain himself, and while that might seem somewhat justifiable considering he has to do it in order to survive, he also augments it with pure sadism: after obliterating the Jedi gathering on Katar and taking a good deal of the Miraluka with them, he finds Visas Marr and makes her his apprentice- mutilating her face in a cruel mimickry of eyesockets, and mind raping her into submission to seal the deal. And let's not forget Darth Sion (especially in the Male Exile playthrough), who delights in inflicting pain on others, from beating the living daylights out of the depowered Kreia to torturing Atton to death
Although not technically a video game, Nelis, the shadowling queen from the telepath rpg series.Why? where do we begin? she keeps her people in shacks, is constantly invading countries, turning the conquered into slaves, spreads rumors abut her being a goddess, doesn't even let her subjects see her, reanimates the dead for money, and eats female shadowlings to kepp her race dependent on her for survival. great leader.
Bertrand in inFamous 2. This guy turns ordinary human beings into the Corrupted, performs cruel experiments on Kuo, uses the Power Transfer Device to turn Vermaak 88 into Forced Conduits in a process that will eventually drive them insane, was responsible for the sacrificial death of Nix's mother and several hundred others in his attempt to activate his own Conduit powers, and tops it off by ordering the execution of any Conduits or potential Conduits in the starting move towards total genocide. In addition to all that, he also planned on selling the Vermaak as personal soldiers to major powers around the world. This man nearly started an Arms race which might have sparked another World War, and he was tugging the strings the WHOLE TIME. The greatest irony is that this character never fully seems to realize how terrible a monster he's become. His Karmic Transformation is completely lost on him, despite the fact the only power he unlocked through the murder of hundreds of innocents being the transformation into a ravenous monster; the only conclusion he draws from this is that if he has become a monster through the activation of his Conduit powers, then all Conduits are monsters, and must be exterminated.
Father Balder from Bayonetta qualifies. He started the Witch Hunts and is responsible the the death of Luka's father.
Alice: Madness Returns has Dr. Bumby, Alice's shrink who uses hypnosis in order to erase Alice's traumatic memories of her family's death. The reason being that he's the one who started the fire that burned down her house in an attempt to hide his tracks after raping Alice's sister Lizzie. Nowadays he makes a profit on the side via pimping the children he's brainwashed and broken into Empty Shells. A real piece of work.
The X-Men spin-off series X-Men Legends gives us GeneralWilliamKincaid, the Big Bad of the first game who, despite being a mere Canon Foreigner, is an amazingly vile piece of work. His hatred of mutants is so great that he commits numerous crimes: re-activating the destructive Sentinels despite this being a very bad idea; kidnapping innocent mutants (such as the Morlocks from the sewers), in order to experiment on them; creating human-Sentinel hybrids which may not have been made just from mutants; and as the icing on the cake, his ultimate plan is to collapse Asteroid M upon New York City in order to obliterate it and all its inhabitants, just so that humanity blames mutants for it and eradicates them from the face of the Earth! While he does have a Freudian Excuse (revealed in conversation with an NPC) - a mutant with poor control over their power killed his wife - this is far too weak to justify his genocidal hatred, particularly since he's willing to kill millions of humans just to get his revenge. Thankfully, the X-men put a stop to his plans and in the end, he's ultimately arrested and tried for his crimes against humanity.
Dr. Harlan Fontaine, the Big Bad, is entirely behind everything. At first, he looks nice, however he manipulates Ira Hogeboom, a traumatic patient, into burning down the house of people who wouldn't sell the land. What else is that he is willing to kill anyone who discovers his dirty secrets, even to the ones he's been nice to, such as Courtney Sheldon and Elsa Litchmann.
The Black Dahlia murderer aka Garrett Mason is known for murdering women by beating to death or strangling them.
Metroid's Ridley, especially if you count the manga adaptation, is the series version of evil incarnate (this entry assumes the manga is canon). His first encounter with Samus (in the manga) has him landing on Samus' home of K2-L, and telling his minions to "First enjoy the slaughter to the fullest!" Not long after killing most of the planet's workers, he tries to kill the three year old Samus, but her mother saves her. He later eats her parent's bodies after Rodney Aran destroys his ship and badly wounds the giant space dragon. This comes up later when Ridley uses this fact to send Samus into a Heroic BSOD.
Hazama/Terumi Yuuki is the first one, an extremely arrogant and sadistic spirit who revels in the suffering on other people with extreme glee. Amongst his laundry list of puppy-punting include personally responsible for the Black Beast, which destroyed over 80% of the world's population, causing Lotte Carmine to transform into Arakune, regularly uses Human Resources to create and power People Of Mass Destruction, mind raping other people to manipulate them, and... listing all of them would be a chore. His Motive Rant includes plunging the world into despair, the only thing he believed to be the ultimate truth. With 'inflicting despair' to be a goal, and especially when you consider that all of the above, he does For the Evulz, nothing else describe him save an utter Complete Monster.
Relius Clover is an unabashed Mad Scientist, Abusive Fatherpar excellence who views other humans as nothing more but his experiment subjects and would experiment on them with utter glee. He killed both his wife and his daughter and turned them into gynoid killersFor Science! and rightfully earned the hatred of his son Carl. He also uses the same reasoning for inflicting Cold-Blooded Torture on Lambda-11, and most of the atrocities Terumi does is thanks to Relius' research, with Relius fully aware and approving of it all. In one route, he's even willing to kill an ally just for being in his way.
The Emperor from Star Wars: The Old Republic is a really, really cruel man. First, he disintegrated T3-M4, murdered his own parents, drained the energy from a planet, forced Revan and the Exile into his mind, telepathically tortures Exal... it says a lot when the ancient Sith Lords preferred Exar Kun over this guy. It says even more when the Dark Council plotted to overthrow him. And that's not even getting into what Kira endured thanks to him. She fled the Sith because of his evil and during the Jedi Knight's battle with Angral, he possesses Kira purely to do away with her friend. Why? Because he saw visions that her friend might be the one who will defeat him and being Dangerously Genre Savvy he's decided to take the hero out now while he or she is still weak.
The Joker from Batman: Arkham City kills multiple people, sets Bane up to be tortured, freely talks about being physically abusive to Harley Quinn, offers to let his men rape Harley, covers all the usual Bad Boss bases, tries to turn Jim Gordon into a 'roided-up monstrosity, kidnaps Nora Fries to force Mr. Freeze into helping him, blackmails Batman into helping by sending his poisoned blood to hospitals in the Gotham area, etc.
