NPCs who ruined entire games for you?

Oh also Handsome Jack. Nothing is worse than the villain constantly talking to you over the radio, it makes them seem like they have nothing better to do than personally annoy you and it deflates any sense of threat from them. (See also Diablo 3.) I just ended up wanting to beat the game to make him shut up than I did stopping his reign of villainy or anything else. Then the rest of the series went all-in on him, focusing every story around his unfunny garbage. That's when I gave up on Borderlands.

I don't think a single NPC is ever going to be a large enough part of a game to ruin it for me, but yeah, those Borderlands 1 and 2 supporting characters are dire. It's a lot of "funny voices as comedy" or just mentioning something rude instead of writing a joke.

Alphys repeatedly calling your cell phone in Undertale, interrupting whatever you were doing and causing you to click through a bunch of dialogue was enough to make me put the game down and I never ended up going back to it before moving on to other games.

The NPCs in Borderlands 2 are why it took me nearly 6 years to finish that game. I ended up playing a good chunk of that game muted. It's also why I haven't played any Borderlands games past that one. It's doubly bad because several of the voice actors for those games were fantastic otherwise in other games/shows and it seems like they were given the worst material to work with. Ashly Burch, AKA Tiny Tina, was Chloe in Life is Strange and Aloy in Horizon: Zero Dawn.

edit: Yeah, Morgana can be pretty rough at times too. It's like they ignored all the good parts of Teddie and doubled down on the bad parts.

Not an NPC but Lymle from Star Ocean 4's constant use of 'kay made me want to snap the disc in half.

This is a thread of hot takes! lol

But I'm going to go with the homeless lady from Human Revolution that someone mentioned already. I just don't don't know how that was okay... on multiple levels. Somebody had to write the dialog, HIRE a voice actor, direct them and then mix the audio into the game.

Can I say any character actually speaking in Borderlands 2 and 3?

Watch_Dogs 2 is a contender hot off the presses. That game felt awfully tone deaf despite all its attempts to atone for the stale grayness of the first game. They course corrected far too hard and served up a buffet of entirely unlikable people as a result. I didn't finish the first game because I got bored with it half way through; I didn't finish the second because I wanted to get as far away as I could from the home base's character menagerie. I honestly really wanted to like that game but it felt like a game designed by people who learned all the wrong lessons from Jackson Pollock.

Whenever I have dipped into Destiny 2, I inevitably have a pretty good time until a mission involving Failsafe comes up in the queue. Something about the execution of that character just makes my skin crawl, it's like a condensation of all the most cringey, forced-joke moments from Avengers: Age of Ultron.

Mr. X from Resident Evil 2 gets a shoutout; I could barely complete the B scenarios in the original RE2 because of him and he was far more tame in that game. In his case, I appreciate the design, I'm just not built for that. Of all the characters in this post, he's the only one I actually quit playing a game directly because of and for no other reason than his existence.

That said, if I didn't have a morbid fascination with seeing things through to the end, Mass Effect: Andromeda had a lot of contenders. Liam Kosta was repetitive, bland, childish and unrelentingly his archetype which made him unsufferable. I was amazed when I found out he was played by Gary Carr, who turned in my favorite performance by far on HBO's The Deuce. Vetra Nyx had interesting bits to her, but the voice acting just felt so wrong, like a cigarette-addicted Susan Sarandon trying to play a sexpot bug-alien pirate. Doesn't sound so bad on paper, but in practice...likewise, Jaal had the potential to throw wrinkles in everything longtime players knew about Mass Effect interactions due to being the one new (non-hostile) race in an entirely new galaxy...but instead he seemed to exist mostly to remark on how interesting it was that humans Get 'Er Done.

Kai Leng from Mass Effect 3. Maybe the most cringe inducing self-insert OC I've seen in a major AAA franchise. Him and all of Cerberus in that game really brought it down and would have probably been the major sticking point if the whole ending debacle didn't overshadow it.

Wakka from FFX. He's obnoxious, and a racist. It's a shame because throwing a ball at people's faces is a pretty clutch main attack.

And Tataru Taru in FFXIV. I don't know why. I feel like she's hiding something behind that cheery "can-do" attitude.

@noisetank3000: Of all the takes in this thread Tataru is the one where I’m all “how dare..”.

All these years later the first one that comes to mind is Otis in Dead Rising 1 with his constant phone calls throughout the entire game.

Teddie, Rise, Yukiko, and to a lesser extent, Yosuke have made repeat playthrough attempts of Persona 4 absolutely insufferable.

I can’t stand any of them anymore.

Every companion in Dragon Age 2 except Varric and Carver made me drop the game after the first act, although the game was bad anyways so it’s unfair to put it on just the characters.

Borderlands series past Borderlands 1 also makes me want to never touch any of the games. Tiny Tina nearly broke me.

@noisetank3000

At the same time i think Wakka having to come to terms with the hypocrisy of his religion and his unwarranted hatred for the Al Bhed is one of the better parts of FFX. It's not like he's a biblethumping racist from the start to the finish, there's a real character arc throughout the game.

He hates Al Bhed is because his religion tells him that they are bad folk that use forbidden tech and kidnap summoners. His brother got swayed to get rid of the weapon that Wakka gave him and instead use a forbidden Al Bhed weapon. It gets him killed. Turns out the church Wakka supports, uses that same forbidden tech on the down low while preaching how evil it is. And Wakka learns that there's a good reason Al Bhed has been kidnapping summoners. And that the Al Bhed people he comes across in the journey are not evil at all. He sees them suffer. One of his closest friends has Al Bhed heritage. Wakka constantly has to come to terms that his worldview was wrong and based on lies.

It is kind of amazing how moving the "you have to go to sleep" line from inner monologue to a character makes is 100x more obnoxious.

@beforet: As i've said earlier in this thread it's not just that. Theres many reasons I dont like the character. Dont take it personally and dont insult me. Anime cats arent worth internet beef.

EDIT: I may have misread your post as an insult when it may not have been, apologies if that's the case.

@boozak: Nah, no insult intended, I was agreeing with you and honestly commenting on how giving that mechanic a face actively makes the experience worse. I also didn't like those other aspects of the character you mentioned but they weren't as significant a detractor for me.

Do not worry, this is not the Persona 5 stan account.

I can see why people didn't like Hop, but what was perhaps more irritating about that game was the way all the British phrases and idioms were distributed randomly without any thought to which region of the UK they came from. Believe it or not people in Britain don't all have the same verbal mannerisms as one another, and watching a single character randomly alternate between Cockney rhyming slang, Scouse, and Welsh, was pretty jarring, and especially with no audio accompaniment.

I personally hate Claptrap and think the writing in Borderlands has always been rubbish. It was barely funny in 2009, and it's especially not funny 11 years later - the Michael Bay approach of having every character constantly rattle off snarky ironic barely-coherent one liners with every waking breath is not as endearing as the writers seem to think it is.

Morgana constantly telling me to go to sleep was pretty frustrating, but I honestly blame the game designers for that rather than the character, and otherwise found Morgana to be a pretty great member of the team.

Claptrap.

I might have been able to ignore the rest of the writing in Borderlands if not for Claptrap.

Ooohhh, good one. I fucking hated Failsafe. Destiny 2 kinda ruined itself for me with its grind demands, but Failsafe surely didn't help. The concept of sassy robots/AI infuriates me. "Wouldn't it be hilarious if we gave it personality?" NO. NO IT WOULDN'T. Worse yet, with Failsafe they tried so hard to make it this "nudge, nudge, wink wink" ode to meme culture that constantly tries to make "jokes" to the player instead of actually belonging in the game's universe. Fuck everything about Failsafe.

"They're master works all, you can't go wrong."

"They're master works all, you can't go wrong."

"They're master works all, you can't go wrong."

"They're master works all, you can't go wrong."

"They're master works all, you can't go wrong."

That horrible merchant with one line of dialogue almost ruined Dragon's Dogma for me.

Fi from Skyward Sword nearly ruined the game for me. Just stop talking. I'm trying to play a goddam videogame.

Cave Johnson from Portal 2 was pretty annoying, although he was far from game-ruining. His shtick felt a bit over-the-top silly. Saying silly things in a robot voice: can be funny. Saying silly things in a silly human voice: not that funny. Just felt a little out of place in a game that otherwise had great writing for other characters. (Saying silly things in a Stephen Merchant voice: Always funny.)

Kane & Lynch Dead Men. There was a rooftop scenario where you had to avoid getting killed by a helicopter, yet the NPC ai was so dumb it kept getting killed, and I had to redo it so many times. At least that's how I remember the whole thing.

Other NPC annoyances, but rarely severe enough to actually make me quit a game:

NPCs that just keep talking and talking while you are trying to do things, like in Metro Exodus and Borderlands

NPC kids, as in God of War 2018 ... they quickly become annoying

Overly stereotypical characters, like Michael in GTA V ... Trevor was a blessing

Don't forget to reload, Dr. Freeman!

Any character from any Borderlands game. I wish I can find that stuff as "so bad it's funny" material, but it's all garbage.

A lot of the last act of that game was a let-down, story-wise and mechanics-wise. It ended up feeling too video-gamey for me, if that makes sense. A lot of conveniently placed items, guards standing in certain formations, tons of stuff that felt out-of-place in what was supposed to be a real world.

And also, story spoilers, what the fuck was Hugo's sickness? What is a Threshold? Why is it bad? Did they ever explain it? It seemed like it got put on the backburner in exchange for melodrama and I was never clear on what exactly it was that was so terrible about him being sick. It just seems like he can control rats.

I came here to say Ashley.

Sit in the dumpster and pipe down!

On the opposite side of this question, Ellie from Last of Us was an amazing NPC.

That's how it's done.

...eh? Is she really a NPC tho?

I thought about that after, probably not since you get to play her eventually. I guess up until the point you play her she's a perfect NPC. :)

Tali

*runs for cover*

Is not in any way an NPC.

@efesell: I haven’t played since Mass Effect 2 came out. Can you play as her, or do you just bring her with her and give her orders?

In any event, she annoyed me.

I thought I had purged Diablo 3's Covetous Shen from my brain, but now you've brought him back.