Top 10 Video Game Heroes Who Never Should Have Won
Top 10 Video Game Heroes Who Never Should Have Won
Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’re counting down our picks for the Top 10 Video Game Heroes Who Never Should Have Won. For this list, we’ll be looking at games which pushed the player to question whether they were really playing on the side of the good guys. Naturally, there will be spoilers. Disagree about who the real villains were in these video games? Let us know in the comments.
#10: The Horrible Goose
“Untitled Goose Game” (2019)
A viral sensation, Untitled Goose Game swam against the current of high-res graphics and sprawling worlds to provide players with a simple little cartoon game where their only goal was to help an awful goose ruin everyone’s good time. Whether he was sneaking off with prized possessions or honking loudly at the most inappropriate moments, the goose quickly became the scourge of his neighborhood. There’s no story to justify his feathery terrorism, he’s just being a jerk. Some geese just want to watch the world burn. And that’s exactly why everyone loved it - the pure catharsis of wreaking petty mischief on an otherwise orderly world.
#9: Alex Mercer
“Prototype” (2009)
Mercer begins Prototype as a bit of a mixed bag. Sure, he unleashed a deadly virus upon New York City. And, sure, he is now an unstoppable mutant who devours innocent civilians to replenish his health. But he basically stumbled into this situation and really is trying to put it right. The player can keep telling themselves that for most of the game while they run around with axes for hands. Of course, by the second game he has become a full-blown supervillain and you wonder whether maybe, at some point during his murderous rampage, he might have lost sight of things.
#8: Tim
“Braid” (2008)
At a glance, Braid seemed to be using one of the most tried-and-proven formulas in all of gaming - a side-scrolling platformer where a brave hero tries to track down an imperiled princess. The things that separated Braid from the pack, however, were a creepy, gothic atmosphere and a time-rewinding mechanic which forced players to flip their understanding of the situation to solve the puzzle. And, as it turned out, they also had to flip their understanding of the game’s story - the princess was trying to escape Tim all along, leaving traps behind her in an attempt to slow him down. In the end, all of the player’s ingenious puzzle-solving efforts were helping a predator track down his prey.
#7: Wander
“Shadow of the Colossus” (2005)
Another twist on the “save the princess” formula, Shadow of the Colossus charts Wander’s quest to bring his beloved back to life by slaying a series of gigantic beasts. But something always feels off - the creatures aren’t sinister monsters just big lumbering animals. With each majestic being the player stabs out of existence, the quest comes to feel more and more like a crime against nature. It’s clearly taking its toll on Wander too, who looks increasingly sickly and begins to sprout horns. By the time his quest is over, he has unwittingly unleashed an evil entity known as Dormin from captivity and is possessed by it. Not great, Wander, not great.
#6: Kazuya Mishima
“Tekken” (1994)
Tekken’s original storyline saw Kazuya entering the Iron Fist tournament to take revenge upon his father, Heihachi, for throwing him off a cliff. That’s a pretty sympathetic motivation as these things go, and watching Kazuya take his dad down and seize control of the family company was a pretty satisfying way to tie things up. But then it was revealed that Kazuya had become so powerful by teaming up with the devil and that he was now running the company even more evil-ly than his father had. Across the sequels, he continued to have murderous disputes with various family members and also tried to use his private military to conquer the world. We’re not saying Heihachi had the right idea, but…
#5: Trevor Philips
“Grand Theft Auto V” (2013)
It’s arguable that no Grand Theft Auto protagonist has ever really “deserved” to win. They’re all violent gangsters who rack up quite the body count inside the set mission alone, never mind what the player has them doing in their spare time. But while the likes of Tommy Vercetti and CJ are basically dragged into gang wars which they otherwise might have avoided, Trevor is just a complete psycho. Trevor beats, robs and kills basically whoever he feels like without remorse, and sometimes without reason. Any time you switch to him, he’s doing something insane or terrible (or both). There is literally no reason to root for him - he’s an agent of pure chaos with almost no redeeming qualities. But he sure is funny.
#4: Martin Walker
"Spec Ops: The Line” (2012)
Spec Ops: The Line arrived at a really interesting moment in gaming. Critics and players were starting to pay a lot more attention to the disconnect between video games which painted the protagonist as a hero even as they mowed down hundreds of people during the game. To play with this paradox, Spec Ops had Walker commit increasingly horrifying acts while he followed the orders of a charismatic commanding officer named Konrad. While this was already a pretty morally fraught story, it really twists the knife at the end when it reveals that Konrad died some time ago and Walker has developed a hallucinated version of him to pin the blame on. Walker, like the player, was actually in control the whole time.
#3: James Sunderland
“Silent Hill 2” (2001)
At first glance, James really seems like he’s going to be a straightforward, sympathetic hero. He travels to Silent Hill after receiving a letter from his late wife, Mary, promising to meet him there. Instead, he meets a woman who looks alot like her, Maria, as well as countless terrifying monsters. But while it seems like he is slowly piecing together what happened, the player is actually being drawn through James’ own repressed psyche, which is riddled with guilt from the fact that he is, in fact, the one who killed his terminally-ill wife. On top of this crushing realisation, the player will be met with one of six endings, some of which are utterly insane, but none of which are exactly happy.
#2: Kratos
“God of War” (2005)
Kratos’ epic quest for revenge begins when the God of War, Ares, tricks him into killing his own wife and daughter. While that is an excellent reason for clambering up Olympus to punch some no-good Gods right in their celestial faces, it ignores the fact that Kratos placed himself in Ares’ service in the first place. He was about to get killed on the battlefield, and so he made the Ancient Greek equivalent of a deal with the devil to save his own life, and it ended up costing him his family. The war Kratos ends up waging on Olympus is thrilling and the game’s version of the Gods really do suck, but it is worth remembering that it all begins with Kratos.
#1: Joel
“The Last of Us” (2013)
When the world is thrown into disarray by a mysterious, zombifying pandemic, Joel loses his daughter in the fray and becomes a cold-blooded mercenary, doing whatever it takes to survive. A ray of light appears in this dark world, however, when Joel is tasked with ferrying a young girl named Ellie across the country. The hope is that her natural immunity can be used to create a vaccine. However, when Joel discovers that the process will kill her, he chooses to doom the whole world to its dystopia rather than sacrificing her. It’s a decision that comes from love but Joel “winning” ultimately means that a whole lot of people will die, while also sparking a bloody cycle of revenge in the sequel.