This is inspired by World of Warcraft, but applies to almost anything with a plot these days. There seems to be this trend of having no clear evil in games or anime or whatever. I mentioned World of Warcraft because just about every raving pack of undead or scoundrel or anything else you kill in that game has a sob story behind the scenes that explained why they're out there feasting on the bodies of the supposed good guys. I mean heck even Saregras used to be a good guy. Of course, Blizzard is hardly alone in this practice.
Now I understand you want to give you villians some depth as opposed to just pure evil incarnate. But I recall an article on Spiderman 2 where the director said how they don't want make their villians shallow but on the other hand you don't want to make it look like the villians aren't really villians. One of the earlier tricks used that predates at least Final Fantasy IV was the "I was brainwashed" trick, ala Kain and Golbez. Does anyone even doubt that if Kain betrayed your party yet again he'll be happily welcomed back even though he said you can kill him if he gets brainwashed again?
Later on we moved to more sophisticated technique known as "I was abused as a child" (or insert similarly traumatic experiences). Like I mentioned in the Naruto thread in M&M, being abused as a child allows one to do things like slaughter people without feeling remorse, destroy/take over the world, and becoming a God.
I'm not saving villians can't have motivations and complexity, but it seems like whenever you beat one they just go on crying about if only they had some love or whatever they would not have turned their back on the world and did all these horrible things. To all the villians of the fictional world: get some backbone and take responsibility for being evil. If you're going to try to destroy the world, don't expect anyone to have sympathy because you were abused as a kid.
Unfortunately, this seems to be what passes for 'character development' these days. If this is the best people can do, I'd rather take something that's pure evil incarnate over the sob stories. Would Kefka be any better if he was crying about how they did horrible experiments to him in the Magitek Facility which is why he blew up a world? When you killed Lavos, who will feed the baby Lavos Spawn? Maybe Lavos was just trying to raise his/her/its family and you know, some all consuming entity just needs a lot of stuff to keep its family well-fed? Indeed think about the entire world denied a chance to exist by the actions of heroes of Chrono Trigger! Don't Joe Smoe guy starving to death and/or exterminated by machines in 2400 A.D. have a chance to exist for a short while being wiped out of existence too? Oh wait that's the underlying premise of Chrono Cross there.
Offhand, Final Fantasy Tactics is the only game I can think of where they got the whole 'no clear evil' thing right (besides the Zodiac Beasts obviously, which are obviously pure evil). Some people were deceived, while some had different ideologies, and some were simply slaughtered but everyone took responsibility for fighting and dying for what they believed in. If you're going to have a grey area about good and evil, then people needs to die. Without death, it basically means everyone is good and you're just fighting over nothing in the first place. The lack of true evil works in FFT precisely because people drop like flies all the time and no one faction was any more special than any other.
Now I understand you want to give you villians some depth as opposed to just pure evil incarnate. But I recall an article on Spiderman 2 where the director said how they don't want make their villians shallow but on the other hand you don't want to make it look like the villians aren't really villians. One of the earlier tricks used that predates at least Final Fantasy IV was the "I was brainwashed" trick, ala Kain and Golbez. Does anyone even doubt that if Kain betrayed your party yet again he'll be happily welcomed back even though he said you can kill him if he gets brainwashed again?
Later on we moved to more sophisticated technique known as "I was abused as a child" (or insert similarly traumatic experiences). Like I mentioned in the Naruto thread in M&M, being abused as a child allows one to do things like slaughter people without feeling remorse, destroy/take over the world, and becoming a God.
I'm not saving villians can't have motivations and complexity, but it seems like whenever you beat one they just go on crying about if only they had some love or whatever they would not have turned their back on the world and did all these horrible things. To all the villians of the fictional world: get some backbone and take responsibility for being evil. If you're going to try to destroy the world, don't expect anyone to have sympathy because you were abused as a kid.
Unfortunately, this seems to be what passes for 'character development' these days. If this is the best people can do, I'd rather take something that's pure evil incarnate over the sob stories. Would Kefka be any better if he was crying about how they did horrible experiments to him in the Magitek Facility which is why he blew up a world? When you killed Lavos, who will feed the baby Lavos Spawn? Maybe Lavos was just trying to raise his/her/its family and you know, some all consuming entity just needs a lot of stuff to keep its family well-fed? Indeed think about the entire world denied a chance to exist by the actions of heroes of Chrono Trigger! Don't Joe Smoe guy starving to death and/or exterminated by machines in 2400 A.D. have a chance to exist for a short while being wiped out of existence too? Oh wait that's the underlying premise of Chrono Cross there.
Offhand, Final Fantasy Tactics is the only game I can think of where they got the whole 'no clear evil' thing right (besides the Zodiac Beasts obviously, which are obviously pure evil). Some people were deceived, while some had different ideologies, and some were simply slaughtered but everyone took responsibility for fighting and dying for what they believed in. If you're going to have a grey area about good and evil, then people needs to die. Without death, it basically means everyone is good and you're just fighting over nothing in the first place. The lack of true evil works in FFT precisely because people drop like flies all the time and no one faction was any more special than any other.
