I think it's easier to write a Villain and be compelling because the hero is so overplayed.
Do you personally enjoy a Hero or a Villian?
A game called Disgaea 3 for PS3/PS Vita had you playing as an evil character, Mao, but the whole game was incredibly wacky. It seemed that to be evil was good and to be a nice or helpful person was evil, or that was the impression I got. Disgaea 3 deserves a Game Of The Year award and the combination of "evil" with "wacky" can be used to great effect.
Short answer: I like to play as the villain. Hero isn't bad either, though.
Short answer: I like to play as the villain. Hero isn't bad either, though.
Bioshock Infinite simply combined the hero and the villain.
While I do enjoy the crosses between hero and villain, I absolutely hate having villians given a "soul". A "reason", they're not evil just mislead!
It ruins it.
They are the villain, not the hero.
Consider The Joker, thanks to Johnny Depp and the idea of the character he was cast as maniacally evil. he wasn't hated, he wasn't good, he simply acted within his nature.
And I loved him for it. I love him more then Batman, and yet he's the evil one. I felt no need to have a justification for his actions, he did what he did to see if he could.
He didn't have some huge plot twisting motive behind his attempt to destroy the city, he just wanted to see if he could.
That, in my opinion, is a true villain.
A villain can be great if written right, but I believe it is important to give them motivations for what they do. Sometimes you can have great villains who are evil for the sake of being evil or chaotic (The Joker and Kefka come to mind) but the really truly great villains are ones who see themselves and their motivations as heroic. I'll move to TV for a moment and point to Marcus Crassus from the final season of the Spartacus TV show. He's obviously cast as the villain, and yet he sees himself the defender of Rome, the only man capable of putting down the slave rebellion sparked by Spartacus and the man that, in putting down the rebellion, can save the empire from future recurrences of like event. The show does a great job in showing several nuances of the man; he's a loving but incredibly tough father, a brutal leader but one that expects honest assessment of his enemies absent embellishment or overconfidence, and a man driven by a quest to test himself against one of the greatest warriors the Roman Republic knows but also a man who has no desire for titles or positions that he has not earned.
Doesn't sound like a straight up villain. Certainly he has plenty that can make us revile him, but in certain ways the show does a good job of displaying his humanity and humility alongside his brutality and questionable morals. The villain should be layered like an onion. At times you should question whether he's truly a villain, and at times you should wish his untimely demise, but he should be an equal to the hero in terms of successes and failures to really give for an epic story where you can not really predict the outcome. Hard to strive for, but still, hope that helped some.
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