AquaBat wrote:
If anything, every villain has a story, and none of them should be heightened or lowered. Can we agree to that?
I don't feel bad at all about completely discounting any "evil" done by Mario and Kirby villains. Mostly because Mario and Kirby don't care about it either. They have a race to see who can eat the most cake by the time they get to the end of the racetrack, and all is forgiven.
If the game treats it lightly and doesn't show it on-camera, it's hard for the player to take it seriously. You never once actually see Ganondorf harm a single person or give his henchmen a single order in most of the games, to my recollection; much less set fire to Nibelheim and then fall from the ceiling and impale Aeris. The vast majority of what he does is simply stuff you're assuming he did. Like, there's never any proof that he didn't take over Castle Town peacefully. It's kind of a safe assumption that he probably sunk the castle into the lava and killed a lot of people, but not only do you not see it, but no one ever even actually says he did it. Or says
anything specific about the deaths of
anyone being the result of Ganondorf, with maybe a couple exceptions, like... one death every few games. Apparently ultra-vague remarks like "His evil power radiated out from the temples, and in seven short years, it transformed Hyrule into a world of monsters" and repeatedly calling him the
King of Evil are supposed to be enough to make me hate him. Everyone dances around what he did like they're hiding something, making me think that they're probably all fucking liars and Ganondorf didn't do any of it.
Which reminds me, I would love to see a kart racing game for something like Diablo, with all the seriousness and drama that's actually in the original games. Deckard Cain talking about the fate of the world depending on your drifting technique, and Tyrael giving you a multi-part quest to rebuild his holy spoiler that was shattered into three pieces when he crashed during his kart race against Belial through the Caldeum sewers.
Edit: Katie, feel free to make that into a comic, somehow.