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MisterBananaFoam

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Irritating, Aggravating, and Obnoxious Characters in Otherwise Good Games (IMO)

Yeah, yeah, I know, this is basically the character edition of this list, but I feel that a character's personality deserves to be classified in a different list entirely, as it doesn't really feel like, well, a mechanic. When I think of the word "mechanic," I think of, well, a machine, a device, an aspect of a system that doesn't carry emotional baggage. Characters do. It's what makes them characters, after all. Some, however, carry certain types of emotional and personal baggage and traits that I pretty much consider contraband. Characters with whiny, bratty voices and dialogues. Characters who are lazy and contribute so little to their cause that they might as well not even be there. Characters whose ideas of "comic relief" are horribly skewed. These and other qualities are what offset the following characters into the group of Irritating, Aggravating, and Obnoxious Characters in Otherwise Good Games... in my opinion. (note that this is also another list that I - ah, screw it, you know what I mean)

List items

  • (Games: Borderlands 1 and 2)

    I cannot withhold my absolute loathing of this cancerous little sack of bolts any further. If anything this guy is the utter reason this list exists in the first place. I hate, HATE, HAAAAAAATE Claptrap, with the deepest resentment in my soul. He is everything, and I repeat, EVERYTHING that can and will go wrong with a character in a video game. But enough expunging my hatred, let's make a checklist of all of the faults this character has, shall we? *ahem* Let's see... Shrill, prepubescent voice? Check. Consistently speaks random bullshit sentences? Check. Contributes hardly anything to the plot? Oh, double check. Eventually resorts to juvenile humor? Yep. And, to put the cherry on top, he makes terrible dubstep noises and constantly dances around like a baboon. Well, congratulations, Gearbox! You have successfully designed one of the most obnoxious contraptions that fiction can comprehend! Now do us a favor: Kill him, HANG HIM BY HIS CIRCUIT WIRES, and don't you even fucking DARE think about bringing him back for the sequel. I don't care that everyone started to hate him in-universe in Borderlands 2, the truth is that I hate him more. Times infinity. Squared.

  • (Games: Super Mario Brothers, Mario Sports Series, countless other Mario titles) Princess Peach wasn't always bad. I mean, sure, her personality matched that of a lifeless Barbie doll, and I guess after a while I'm sure a lot of people began to question why her safety measures are so awful after she got kidnapped for, like, the fifth time, but we didn't care because she hardly ever spoke any words at all, and when she did, she was relatively calm about it... then came Mario Galaxy, which ruined all the fun and destroyed every last ounce of likability I tried to contain for Peach by giving her a voice I simply cannot stand. Before, Princess Peach at least sounded somewhat regal and dignified, but now when she speaks, you can practically DIE from how saccharine her voice sounds. Whenever she yelled out Mario's name in the past, at least she was subtle about it, but now it's this screechy-sounding "MAAAAAAAAAAAHREEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOO" that kills nearly all of the blood flow to my brain every time I hear it. Other than that, my complaints aren't too exaggerated, even if she is just a tool to advance the plot (I can forgive that because Mario isn't a seriously story-driven game), but dammit, Nintendo, tone down the volume and energy in her voice back to the Sunshine days, please.

  • (Games: Debuted in Super Mario Sunshine, appears in countless Mario games)

    Bowser Jr. is ALMOST the Mario equivalent of Anakin Skywalker from Star Wars Episode 1. His first appearance was in the GameCube title Super Mario Sunshine, and after having dealt with him for so long, I have quite a few gripes with him. First is that he sounds like he has a constant allergy, what with his nasally voice. Second is his actual allergy towards anything cool. Sure, he apparently had decent parkour skills in Sunshine, but by the time New Super Mario Bros. hit he seemed to have forgotten about all of those aerobatic skills and just shuffles around left and right across the floor trying to run into you. Even Boom-Boom, the miniboss from Super Mario Bros. 3, gives a better effort than he does. My last complaint is that he is (or, rather, was) supposed to be a stand-in for Bowser's other Koopaling cronies, but then they found out the hard way (via the hostile fanbase) that hardly anyone liked him as a character, so the classic Koopa gang was thrown back in, and now Bowser Jr. is just... there. He's annoying, he's hardly any more challenging to beat than the entire Koopa clan, and he's just a lazy idea in general. I suppose he isn't as egregious as some of the other examples on this list, but to this day I still just shake my head in shame whenever he shows up.

  • (Games: Pretty much every single Star Fox title)

    Really, this entry speaks for itself. Slippy might as well be the most detrimental person to add to anyone's team period, as he needs to be rescued so many times from incoming fighters that I'm beginning to wonder if Slippy is in more constant danger than freaking Princess Peach. Oh, and he broke a jukebox in Star Fox Adventures. Case in point: Slippy causes more problems than he solves.

  • (Games: Debuted in Soul Calibur III, now a mainstay of the series)

    Tira is what happens when you take the biggest weeaboo on the internet and ask him/her to come up with a character like Helga from Hey Arnold! To clarify, she has a split personality disorder. One of them is a cutesy-yet-ax-crazy persona and the other comes off as gothic and demented. Neither of them are arousing, and both of them come off as cheesy and incredibly gauche ("Ha ha ha ha! Wanna die now?" or "Let's find out... just how dark your blood is..."). Coupled with yet another harrowing, teenager voice and an idiotic get-up (in one of the games, I'm pretty sure she dresses up as a jester. And that is her serious, non-joke outfit.) and you get Tira, the most devilish emo/kawaii dream team to ever haunt fighting games.

  • (Games: Debuted in Super Mario Land, appears in countless Mario spin-off titles)

    What else can I say? It's quite literally the red-headed stepchild version of Peach. I guess the only thing I can put as a positive about her is that she has a TAD bit more personality than Peach does since she displays tomboyish qualities, but that often just leads to her being even more annoying than she already needs to be. And she has no correlation to anything in the Mario universe besides being the mail-order damsel-in-distress for Super Mario Land, which I guess gives her more credit than Waluigi, but at least Waluigi is hilarious. Well, again, in my opinion. Whatever, Daisy sucks.

  • (Games: Debuted in Animal Crossing, is a main character in the series)

    Sure, people complain about how Mr. Resetti bugs the everlasting bejeezus out of them, but at least he serves as an anti-cheating measure. Tom Nook, on the other hand, is a money-grubbing assflap whose only purpose in the game is to keep mooching off of your bells by selling you furniture, housing, and other tools you need to keep the town tidy. Tom Nook is what would happen if Mr. Krabs used business ethics popularized by Big Bill Hell's, minus the swearing. This walking Ponzi scheme has the absolute gall to stalk you out while browsing houses, and essentially forces you to purchase one with hardly any forewarning. Then you realize you're broke. Hey, that's no problem, though, because Tom Nook will gladly allow you to serve as his bitch for the next 45 minutes as you walk around town accomplishing mundane tasks such as delivering carpets and planting flowers. I think it's alright that Nintendo is helping to teach me how to play Animal Crossing, but why do I have to spend nearly an hour doing this asshole's bidding? The worst part is he doesn't even take off a sizable chunk of your mortgage, he just cuts 4,000 bells from it, which isn't really that much considering your first debt is 19,800. Then, of course, for each time you pay off your house, he slaps ANOTHER mortgage on there in case you want to upgrade to a better house with more space. Screw you, Nookie. That's some bullshit conning right there. He's better at scamming you out of your sweat and dimes than THE GAME'S RESIDENT CON MAN, CRAZY REDD! When people start to like a guy who deals in the BLACK MARKET more than you, you know you have failed as a character.

  • (Debuted in Sonic Adventure, most recent appearance was in Sonic Generations)

    Omochao is the tutorial puppet most commonly used in a lot of the current-generation Sonic the Hedgehog games, and he/she/it(?) is commonly referred to as the Navi of the franchise. He pops up every now and then to give you hints in a robotic 10-year-old's voice, except by "every now and then" I mean "every 5 seconds." Some of his advice isn't even that helpful; there's one point in Sonic Adventure 2 where he teaches you how to glide... right after you figure out how to glide, remarking with a "...oh, but you probably already knew about that." You can't escape from him in Sonic Heroes, either, since he's in the main menu constantly talking his head off there, too! This guy is so annoying that the developers put in a way to "kill" him, which rewards you by having him state that he's not going to help you anymore. And no, really, I meant that as a reward, because you'll definitely want to spend a few minutes breathing in without this flying sack of crap babying you through the game. (It gets worse in Sonic Generations, where he/she/it gets an annoyingly girlish voice)

  • (Game: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion)

    If I was a celebrity, I wouldn't have too much beef with my fanbase, even if they did consistently beg for an autograph or a photo or something of the sort. I WOULD, however, have a problem with the fans that follow me around and stalk me out like they're a witness protection agency, and for many a gamer, that is exactly how they feel towards this... thing. The Adoring Fan is an NPC that shows up after you become the Grand Champion of the Arena, and by shows up, I mean he shows up nearly INSTANTLY. And come on, just look at this guy! He looks like the love child of Vegeta and Bilbo Baggins! If you manage to avoid the Adoring Fan, he'll track you down like flies do to feces. Once he catches up to you, he asks if he can have the dubious honor of following you around for a while. Sure, you can tell him to stay put, but he'll always show up again at the most inconvenient of times to bug you about it until your wits are driven to their end. Oh, but I know what you're thinking, "Can't I just kill him and rid myself of his reeking presence?" *EEEEEEEEEEH* Sorry, bub. Killing him may get rid of him for now, but he'll always respawn and go straight back to his filthy stalking habits as if nothing had happened at all. You can take this cockhugger to the top of Dive Rock, punt him down a rocky mountain and stab his mangled corpse twenty-seven times and he'll STILL find a way to resurrect himself good as new. Maybe the Elder Gods are so hesitant to let this repugnant pig-face dwell within their domain that they refuse to grant his soul access to the afterlife. What a fitting punishment.

  • (Game: Prototype 2)

    If you read my long rant about how cruddy and repetitive Prototype 2's story and cast are, I shouldn't need to say much. For those of you who haven't, let me break it down for you. Prototype 1 was a game where you played as an ex-scientist-turned-viral-monstrosity named Alex Mercer, who has no memory of his past or what happened to start the outbreak. His character wasn't written with persistent details but was bearable enough to follow along with. Some people, however, thought of Alex Mercer's character to be rather anti-heroic, and thus didn't really engage in him as a character all that well. Radical's solution to this immensely minor problem was to forge an entirely new and doubly unlikable protagonist in order to stop Mercer, which resulted in James Heller. 98% of his dialogue comes out as f-bombs, and while I'm usually willing to let other characters get away with obscene amounts of cussing (like that guy from House of the Dead: Overkill), the way James's voice actor says it just doesn't make it sound right in the slightest. His character is stoic and uninteresting, somehow even more so than the character who is literally THE MANIFESTATION OF THE BLACKLIGHT VIRUS. It doesn't help that his back story is incredibly contrived and sounds like something the writers wrote on a napkin at Starbucks in a last-ditch attempt at making us feel "sorry for him." Okay, his wife and child are dead. That's terrible. You know what else is terrible, Radical? CANNIBALISM. BIOMASS-CONSUMPTION. It's one thing that the protagonist is an gruff, thick-head buffoon who consumes the bodies and memories of innocent human beings, but now you're trying to get me emotionally invested in him? No chance. Maybe I would consider it if you had him take some anger management classes or go on a non-fleshy diet.

  • (Game: Borderlands 2)

    If it isn't obvious already, I'm not a huge fan of some of the casting decisions for the Borderlands games. Only one of the characters in-game actually managed to make me laugh (Marcus Kincaid, the weapons salesman) because most of the others usually went with an overly-ridiculous running gag. It should come to no surprise, then, that Tiny Tina's running gag makes me want to gag her with a spoon. I first saw her character design in the trailer, and I thought to myself, "Oh, sweet, maybe they'll shape her up to be like Tank Girl or something," but instead they went with a voice that sounds like a preteen trying to imitate a black lady. Painfully. On repeat times one hundred. It's odd, too; everyone else finds this funny. If there was one character that I would catch the most flak for so far, it would probably be Tina, but my decision stands. Also, lemme invent a commandment: Thou shalt not borroweth Snoop Dogg's vocabulary unless thine is indeed the Dogg himself. Or Lion. Whatever, I don't like Tiny Tina, end of story.

  • (Game: Comic Jumper)

    You know a character is bad when you achieve hatred for them through playing the DEMO of a game. There's two things you should know about Gerda, and two things only. 1. She's obnoxiously sarcastic, and 2. She chimes in whenever your health goes down a quarter and yells at you to "stop sucking." And since Comic Jumper is balls-to-the-wall difficult, you'll be hearing a LOT from Gerda. It's not often that I base my purchase of a game on one flaw, but if it keeps me from hearing her every fifteen seconds, then good riddance, I say.

  • (Games: Tony Hawk's Underground 1 and 2)

    Eric is an incredibly-designed character from a certain perspective, as far as Tony Hawk games could go. At first, he's nothing but a friendly rival to the character, but then he goes batshit crazy with wanting to obtain fame and actively tries to deface your career by stealing your moves and landing you in hot water with the local authorities wherever you seem to go. It's the perfect motivation to keep you going just so you can put this lying, smug sack of shit in his place by the end of the game. Don't get me wrong, though; at the end of the day, he's still an annoying, insufferable smeghead, and rightfully deserves a spot on this list.

  • (Game: Soul Calibur V)

    Ugh. UUUUUUGH. I didn't really like the writing in Soul Calibur V to begin with, not to mention the story, but fuck if Namco didn't intentionally go out of their way to shape the most agonizingly girlish character in the entire series. Pyrrha is the daughter of the previously-playable but now-deceased Sophitia Alexandra, and, before the game drives the nail in, let me just say she's... kind of not really into killing people. Okay, fine, she's an outright apologetic fighter. An apologetic fighter with a personality and voice that (pardon the Brony speak, but) make Fluttershy look like Jane Lynch. One thing that really aggrivates me about Pyrrha is that she never shuts up during battle (much like every other Soulcalibur fighter), but goes damn near dead silent during story cutscenes. Talk about a gameplay and story contrast. In all seriousness, however, just go find some gameplay of Pyrrha and look me straight in the eye and tell me that a person that sounds like that should be even remotely close to a sword or a shield, let alone in combat.

  • (Game: Star Fox Adventures)

    Behold, the Jar Jar Binks of the Star Fox universe, and with characters like Slippy, that REALLY says something. If his unbearable Disney Channel-esque voice doesn't get you, his constant hunger for blue mushrooms and headache-inducing quips most likely will. If there was one thing that I'm glad didn't return to the Star Fox series after Adventures, it's Prince Tricky.

  • (Game: Dead Rising)

    You know your character is awful when they don't even have a single word of voiced dialogue in your game and they somehow manage to make it on this list. It's not enough that he loves to call you up at the most inopportune of times while you're scurrying about the Willamette mall, but he does this in reaction to EVERY SINGLE side mission in the game, and most of the time, these missions end up taking place miles away from you. He also gets mad at you if a zombie attacks you and interrupts the transceiver call, which will happen quite a bit if you're stuck in a heavily-infested area. If you still aren't convinced, just go watch PhantomSavage's playthrough of the game. You'll see what I'm getting at.

  • (Game: Sonic '06)

    If Sonic '06 wasn't a terrible enough game as it is, it also managed to introduce us to Silver the Hedgehog. First off, his character design is flat-out ugly; his design makes it look like he's being facepalmed by a phantom. Second, Silver sounds like a train wreck. A squeaky, snotty train wreck. If his character traits weren't bad enough, you also have to fight him at one point, and this fight is awfully programmed. You approach him, he catches you in midair, flings you into the nearest wall, runs high speed at you, and does it again until you lose all of your rings. You actively have to run away from him for the first part of the fight until he starts throwing objects at you, which THEN allows you to run over and attack him (the game also doesn't tell you about this, of course). Silver is a bane to the flair and the fun of the Sonic series, and I'm glad he stayed out of the series canon prior to the disaster that was Sonic '06.

  • (Game: Final Fantasy X)

    Meet Tidus. He's a mushy gob of selfishness and immaturity and has a stupid girlish haircut. He's the main character of Final Fantasy X, and boy howdy, does he want you to know it. This is HIS story, mind you, and if anyone else tries to convince you otherwise, well, Tidus will gladly reassure you by whining and making a barbarous uproar that is supposed to be interpreted as laughter. He consistently gets in the way of other people's subplots and is the champion of the most logic-deprived sport this side of fiction. And yes, I consider it a blessing that you get to beat up a child version of him and his friends in the tutorial stage of Kingdom Hearts.

  • (Game: Call of Duty: Black Ops 2)

    As the Call of Duty series... *ahem*... 'matured', the games appeared to get less sophisticated and geared more towards its target market (no offense). Naturally, since every teenager on the planet likes to swear like it's going out of style, it's only natural that this 'potty-mouth' trend would eventually make its way through the development team, and thus we have characters like Admiral Thomas Briggs. Okay, yes, everyone in Black Ops 2 cusses like a goddamn sailor, but in my humble opinion Briggs is the worst offender, because:

    A)HE'S THE GODDAMN OVERSEER OF THE UNITED STATE'S ENTIRE NAVAL FORCE, yet he boasts a vocabulary equivalent to that of most thirteen-year-old children, and

    B)He seems to have an unyielding lust for the word 'cocksucker.' Trust me, he'll says it so many times you'd wish someone would actually shove their throbbing phallus down his esophagus.

    *SPOILERS*

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    It can be VERY tempting to whack this guy during the end of the aircraft carrier mission, and I'm sure a lot of players would go through with it had it not lock out the good ending if you do so.

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    In short, Briggs could have been an intriguing character, but his unsubtle use of language completely ruins his character. He's not the only character in Black Ops 2 who does this, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a worse offender (besides Frank Woods, but for some reason I could stand his swearing. Briggs's just doesn't fit his character at all.)

  • (Game: Halo 4)

    Talk about a pointless character. This dumb sack of shit appears about halfway through the game simply to chastise Master Chief and eventually get jettisoned off of his own ship for trying to kick him out. That's it, that's literally the extent of his character arc. I guess you could say that he's just ignorant of the Forerunner threat and wants to keep the ship safe from Cortana's rampancy, but why would you ever feel the need to keep your best man, who has single-handedly slaughtered ENTIRE DROVES of Covenant troops, off of the front lines, let alone treat him like a dirtbag? It's like if a war veteran returned from Afghanistan only for his douchebag roommate to kick him out of his apartment because he doesn't like his new girlfriend. What a fucking idiot.

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