Megawat22 said:
We have games where you can play these kinds of characters already don't we? Generally they're the RPGs with dialogue choices but they still exist to an extent (not the child raping though, I doubt any AAA dev would touch that subject with a 20ft pole).
I mean in TellTale's Walking Dead I brutally murdered several people, stole, left others for dead and I'm sure I even used people for my own purposes at points. Hell I even checked the sadistic box when I gloated about killing a man's family after beating him to a pulp.
When I write it out like that it makes my Lee seem like some kind of psychopath, but when I was playing I had a reason for doing all those actions and generally felt justified in doing them. When I was playing I wasn't playing as a psycho who kills for fun, I was playing as a survivalist, who knew that the world had changed and you had to do some grim stuff to survive.
So as I said, we have these kinds of games already, it's just that they tend to be written in ways that allow us to justify our actions and make them seem realistic, or they're done poorly and come off as comedically bad (or just distasteful).
Sorry, I'm sure it wasn't intended, but I had to point that one out. Please proceed to the back of Line C-5 for your
punishment. :x
On-topic? I'd love if there were more games that starred an evil protagonist, especially an evil protagonist that you could create. But I also agree with those who posted above me, that it would be rather worthless for a game to spit out more 'evil for evil's sake' drek. Evil characters should be believably so, especially if they're the protagonist, otherwise we'd have yet another worthless GTA game with shitty writing.
A character like Kefka, perhaps.
1.) He's obviously a sadist, as we saw at Doma when he condemned an entire castle full of innocent people to a painful death by poison for the sake of mere expediency.
2.) He's the brains behind an empire that keeps the populace in constant poverty. Every town in Final Fantasy VI is full of people who can barely make a living if it weren't for the fact that a group of adventurers just ~happened~ to stroll into town carrying hundreds of thousands of gil and actually spend half of it. He does worse than steal from the poor.
3.) I'm not sure if it's common knowledge, but according to modern criminology, rape is not actually about the sex. Rapists commit their crime because it makes them feel powerful, to have another person at their mercy and deprive them of their free will. It's a terrible crime that causes severe psychological damage in its victims. I would venture to say that both Terra and Celes count as Kefka's rape victims, even though he never touched either of them sexually.
Terra had her freedoms stripped away through the slave crown that Kefka forced her to wear, and made her commit terrible war crimes which she was powerless to disobey until that chance encounter with the frozen Esper knocked the crown off her head.
Celes was bred in a laboratory by Kefka's magitek engineer, Cid. She was the product of a eugenics experiment, and she was literally born to kill people with magic at Kefka's command. Kefka's hold on her wasn't literal mind control magic like it was with Terra, but rather by conditioning throughout her childhood, where she was deprived of the choice to be who she wanted, until one person, Locke, cared enough to make her feel like she was a worthwhile human being.
4.) Cyan had a wife and child in Doma who died when Kefka poisoned the water supply. He committed genocide of the Esper race, killing them and harvesting their magicite to power his war machines. Among those Espers were likely plenty who were considered to be children among Esper society.
5.) After he messed up the statues and became the God of Chaos and Destruction, he blasted the everliving shit out of the heroes and flung them off of a floating island to crash down to the earth below, which was then wracked with such explosive force that the entire geography of the world was altered, and Balance turned to Ruin. He left the heroes for dead, either assuming that they already were, or that they would soon bleed to death if not. Either way, he was a god now, so what did he care? His plans were complete. It came back to bite him in the ass later, obviously, because the heroes ~did~ survive and eventually defeated him, but many of them were unconscious for weeks, Celes was even in a coma for months due to her injuries, and would have died had she not been found and cared for.
6.) Kefka was also very manipulative, and used people for his own personal gain all the time. He certainly used Terra and Celes, he even manipulated Emperor Gestahl and eventually supplanted him, if not in name then certainly in terms of influence. Remember, Kefka controlled the Empire's armies. Kefka controlled the magitek research facility, where he was building his own army of magic mechs, mutated monsters that were half-beast and half-machine, and the conditioned, manipulated Celes to lead them all into battle.
The only real shame is that we don't get to see what kind of person Kefka was ~before~ the events of Final Fantasy VI. What made him become this way? We're really only left with the obvious answer: ambitions of power and the spark of insanity.
The game that I would love to see would be "
Final Fantasy VI: The Years Before" (totally a shout out to
Final Fantasy IV: The After Years - I like that title), where we get to see what made Kefka into the apalling, horrible man he is in Final Fantasy VI, through his own eyes. The only problem would be that I don't really trust modern Square-Enix to do a game like that without fucking it up.
