Zanza: How unfortunate. I had a desire for friendship. But granting intelligence to the lives I created was a mistake. A god should not long for friendship!
Shulk: You're wrong! Meyneth chose to live alongside us. She grew to consider us our friends. You should have accepted that! But what you were hoping for was not friendship. You wanted worthless slaves, our lives as food!
Zanza: Just as I suspected, it appears I was mistaken to grant free will. However, all will soon be over. The Telethia will exterminate all life on Bionis. I will then create a new world, just as I have done many times before!
Shulk: You're wrong! Meyneth chose to live alongside us. She grew to consider us our friends. You should have accepted that! But what you were hoping for was not friendship. You wanted worthless slaves, our lives as food!
Zanza: Just as I suspected, it appears I was mistaken to grant free will. However, all will soon be over. The Telethia will exterminate all life on Bionis. I will then create a new world, just as I have done many times before!
The Xenoblade Chronicles games feature all manner of villains, but the following all go the extra mile in their cruelty, bloodlust, and megalomania.
All spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!
- First game:
- Zanza, the god of Bionis, is the mastermind behind the game's plot and a monstrous excuse of a deity whose insatiable pride ruins countless lives in an effort to prolong his own. Revealed in the sequel to be one half of the scientist Klaus who accidentally destroyed the universe in his experiments, Zanza became a cruel monster who repeatedly exterminated all life on Bionis through the Telethia whenever they drifted away from him, even possessing the noble giant Arglas and managing to destroy Agniratha in his attempt to destroy the rival goddess Meyneth alongside all Mechonis. Living on in the Monado after he was sealed away, Zanza murders a young Shulk and the expedition team who discover the Monado before reviving the boy and using him as a host for years. In the final act of the game, Zanza has Shulk killed again by his disciple Dickson to take form once again, transforms the High Entia into Telethia to repeat the extermination of Bionis all over again, and murders both Meyneth and Egil before destroying Mechonis, dismissing everything and everyone as mere bacteria and food to sustain his own cruel existence. Even in spite of all of his hollow justifications for the perpetual cycle of misery he has created, Zanza is revealed at heart to be nothing more than the definition of megalomania and endless arrogance, disgusting almost every single being who knows of his true evil.
- Originally a slimy, cowardly weasel of a man, Mumkhar ends up becoming something far worse entirely. After smugly leaving his close friends Dunban and Dickson to die on the battlefield, he is captured by the robotic Mechon and turned into one of their own, and willingly betrays his people by throwing in his lot with the Mechon and aiding them in their conquest. Going by the name of Metal Face, he leads a squad of Mechon in an attack on Colony 9, slaughters scores of people, and personally murders Dunban's sister Fiora, all out of hatred, envy, and spite towards the man, and gleefully brags about it to Shulk, her Love Interest. Later on, he leads an assault on Eryth Sea, which ends with him killing Sorean, the emperor of the High Entia. After his final defeat at the hands of Shulk and company, he doesn't hesitate to try to murder them all after they decide to spare his life. Fueled entirely by spite and cruelty, Metal Face cements his status as one of the party's most hated enemies.
- Xenoblade Chronicles X:
- Grandmaster Luxaar is the lord and master of the Ganglion Coalition, a galaxy-wide crime syndicate and tyrannical empire that Luxaar rules with cruel fanaticism. In his quest for "purity" across the cosmos, Luxaar regularly commits genocide against entire races, enslaving those he does not exterminate and often forcing innocents to follow his rule lest he subject their worlds to similar fates. Upon learning of humanity and its connection to the Ganglion's former masters, Luxaar deems humankind a plague deserving of annihilation, and proceeds to lead an assault on Earth that wipe out billions of humans, after which he pursues the survivors across the universe. Luxaar's insane xenophobia comes to end after he massacres his way through dozens of human soldiers and attempts to murder the twenty million sleeping vestiges of humanity.
- Alex is a BLADE who blames the destruction of the Earth on any xeno, regardless of how they're affiliated. Tricking Rook into gathering a number of xenos and attending a seminar that will take place in the wilderness, Alex uses this excuse to attempt murder on the xenos attending as the start of his Final Solution. An opposing group led by Eliza condemns the actions of Alex and his terrorist friends, and in response, Alex tries to have Eliza assassinated during an assembly to advocate human-xeno cooperation. Later, the player finally confronts Alex at Cauldros, where he's seen conspiring with Ganglion forces—the same Ganglion forces who actually did destroy the Earth—to bring about his genocidal ambitions.
- Xenoblade Chronicles 2: The egotistical, giggling Dr. Castrofari has children all over Alrest drugged and kidnapped as fodder for his twisted experiments, which aim to forcefully augment his specimens into artificial Blades. When Perun confronts him on his deeds, Castrofari offers to let the children go if Perun surrenders herself as his next subject—only to laugh and confess he'll murder all of the children anyways, giddily announcing his intention to experiment on Perun until she’s nothing but a withered husk.
- Xenoblade Chronicles 3: While "Z" has agency issues, several of his subordinates, known as "Consuls" in public and "Moebius" in private, have no such concerns:
- Consul D was an exceptionally sadistic Agnian soldier named Blackblaze Dirk before he became a Moebius, a complete lunatic who would go about lopping the heads off everyone he encountered with a pair of self-made claws. As a Consul, D is a savage Hero Killer responsible for the murder of numerous named heroes in the story and the massacre of entire Colonies, such as Colony 18, where one of his casualties was one of Eunie's past selves. Close to his death, D is revealed to keep a gigantic collection of severed heads, each from a child soldier he's slaughtered, whether they fought or begged or were on his own side, as he admits all that he cares about is the "superlative feeling" of murdering the innocent over and over in a Forever War he knows is bogus.
- Consul F is the eerily polite Consul of Colony 0, serving as a behind-the-scenes string-puller in the Keves-Agnus war. F uses assassination, information control, and other duplicitous forms of subterfuge and sabotage to ensure the war continues unendingly and countless lives are lost to maintain his power. F has altered his Colony to transform the soldiers into robotic puppets who hang on his every word at the youngest age possible, and now plans to sacrifice them all to power his machines of destruction. When his favored soldier Segiri pleads for the lives of her comrades in exchange for her own, F commends her selflessness only to murder her allies anyway.
- Consul X, one of the original Moebius selected by Z, meets the heroes in the midst of massacring her own Colony after it goes Gold, gleefully slaughtering dozens of her own loyal soldiers all for having fought for a goal she knew would result in their demise the entire time. When the heroes confront her later on, she's playing the Devil on the shoulder of the traitor Shania, encouraging her to betray the heroes and embrace her worst traits. When Shania fails her, X decides to annihilate the City, a refuge for thousands of civilians who have freed themselves from the Forever War and found normal lives for themselves, all because she wants a spiteful "last laugh".
- Consul Y, another of the original Moebius selected by Z, is a Mad Scientist extraordinaire, whose creation and implementation of the Flame Clocks serves to make him arguably the most active cause of the unending Keves-Agnus war. Designing the Flame Clocks to require all those installed with them to have to kill their enemies simply to survive, Y is a smug, prideful braggart over his hand in perpetuating the atrocious war, noting he built the Flame Clocks out of nothing but curiosity. Y currently plans to implement an entirely new Flame Clock design, meant to turn the corpses of those lost in Keves-Agnus into his mindless, memory-wiped slaves, and to test his new design, Y poisons the entirety of Colony Omega to revive them as his zombies.
