Being someone who draws and paints for a living, I have a lot of interest in art in videogames, from background assets to weapon designs and character designs. Aesthetic pleasure is a major reason why I replay Uncharted 2 from time to time. The deliciously-detailed and impressively-designed backgrounds are like porn to me.
 
Most of the games I enjoy tend to have what I consider to be fantastic character designs, like Team Fortress 2 and  Odin Sphere. Team Fortress 2 succeeds in giving each playable character class a distinct silhoutte and just the right amount of detail to help players understand immediately what each class does. The cartoony aesthetics help to reinforce the idea that despite the violence, the world of TF2 is one that lives in the realm of humor and silly fun. As for Odin Sphere, aside from the gorgeous painterly 2D graphics, each character is unique in design, loaded with detail and every playable character has his/her own distinct color scheme that suits their personalities.
 
I also have a kind of a morbid fascination with terrible art, and that includes pig disgusting videogame character designs. What I mean by 'pig disgusting' is unintentional ugliness, or a failure to express what the character's supposed to be. Well-designed monsters are meant to be ugly or disgusting, but a badly-designed monster looks like something little children could have scrawled, with little care for aesthetic sense. Games like Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust is home for many terrifying examples of supposedly attractive characters that look like the stuff of nightmares.
 
There are also cases where the character design is bad in the context of gameplay. Example: Brown characters in a brown background under a brown sky. While it may make sense for a military-themed videogame to have characters wearing camouflage to match the colors of the environment, if you're playing a game in third-person and your character as well as other characters look almost exactly alike with little difference in silhoutte shape it can get pretty confusing.

I'd like you to share with me: What game(s) do you personally think have terrible character designs, and is there a reason why you consider them to be awful?

The new Dante from the Ninja Theory Devil May Cry is pretty terrible.

You can't get any worst than this. The president of ninja theory paste his own head on the character and calls himself dante.  
 

" @ZanzibarBreeze: You win. "

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You can't get any worst than this. The president of ninja theory paste his own head on the character and calls himself dante.  
 

 

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You can't get any worst than this. The president of ninja theory paste his own head on the character and calls himself dante.  
 

 

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anything from final fantasy

" @Mayu_Zane: 
 
This
 
and
 
this
 
I recommend reading his post on Clive Barker's Jericho as well. Fascinating stuff. "

" @HitmanAgent47 said:

"

You can't get any worst than this. The president of ninja theory paste his own head on the character and calls himself dante.  
 

 

"

Not having known about this before, I laughed for a good five minutes. Thank you for sharing this with me. "

Lara Croft is pretty atrocious. Not only does she not dress like people she's also supposed to be a archeologist / thief.
 
Exhibit A:

Try anything by Hyung Tae Kim. Any female in Soul Calibur. Anything from Unreal.
Also, even though I love this:  

How the fuck could I forget this train-wreck.  
This isn't even some special outfit. This is what she wears in the game to fight people in.

Hm... Anything made by Bethesda, really.
 

" @ZanzibarBreeze: f him and his voice "

" Hm... Anything made by Bethesda, really.
 

"

I'm going to say Gears of War, but that's only because it looks like it was created by a testosterone filled 16 year old . And really, I didn't much find much offense in the whole design until I say Anya, and realized just how terrible they are at designing characters.

There's some serious Final Fantasy hate itt. I would agree with FFX but I like most of the other games. 
 
As for me, I was never really a fan of the character design in Rogue Galaxy. 

" @Mayu_Zane said:

" @HitmanAgent47 said:

"

You can't get any worst than this. The president of ninja theory paste his own head on the character and calls himself dante.  
 

 

"

Not having known about this before, I laughed for a good five minutes. Thank you for sharing this with me. "

 
I wasn't going to play the game anyway, but I can now officially no longer playing the game knowing that this is the case. The new Dante is legitimately ugly. I don't turn on games (and television) to look at ugly people; I turn them on to look at good looking people. I'm not commenting on that British man, I'm just commenting on that character's face.

Nor can I support such arrogance as putting one's self in a game as the main goddamn character. "

Any Warhammer 40k game that uses the original models' sense of scale and proportion. Based on the minis, a Marine's thigh would have to be as thick around as maybe my bicep to fit into his armour... it's worse for Terminators. Human Guardsmen are bulbous half-men with massive hands. Space Marine and DoW2 seem to have avoided this, so props.

" The new Dante from the Ninja Theory Devil May Cry is pretty terrible. "

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" @vidiot: Please don't turn this into another DMC whine-fest. "

" @ZanzibarBreeze: Goddammit. I knew someone would beat me to Tidus.
 
Well, how about this?!
 

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" @ArbitraryWater:  Fighting games can have female characters that aren't designed by idiots who are probably sex offenders. "