Antagonists in Video Games

What makes a good antagonist? An increasingly specific case study for why Zenos yae Galvus is a placid set-piece to me.

I play both Final Fantasy XIV and Star Wars: The Old Republic. There’s this general vibe from the FFXIV community, broadly, that Zenos is one of the better antagonists of the game’s long narrative. The common consensus is that “I love to hate him” and also “I want to fuck him” (with some variations on the latter that are…frankly disturbing. I won’t quote them here, but uh…lemme just say into the microphone that some white women need therapy and to respect history and maybe not use “colonize” that way, please and thank you).

This piece contains spoilers both for Final Fantasy XIV (up to Shadowbringers) and Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Zenos yae Galvus from Final Fantasy XIV is that traditional anime character who just…lives to fight. He just really cannot hold his attention on anything that isn’t a worthy challenge for longer than a second, like everything else bores him. He’s the Prince of a Powerful Empire, and it bores him to pieces because he sees nothing of worth in the Empire or in the people the Empire conquers after the fight is done. The only entity that’s even mildly entertaining to him is the player character, who has the power and skill to meet him on equal footing. Honestly, it takes a lot of fans and the Hamilton references he constantly makes to do a lot of the heavy lifting of his character as a character. He continually tries to get personal with you, the player character, by describing you as his only friend. And, for some audience members, this approach works wonders! He’s beloved, he’s loathed, and for some, he’s the hybrid state of beloathed.

But for me…well, to be honest with you, I can only see him as a joke. He’s a threat. Sure, nobody’s disputing the level of power that the story has given him. And, with Endwalker, he’s likely only going to become more powerful. But, as I’ve constantly thought about Zenos’s relationship with my own Warrior of Light, examining their interactions in the canon text, Zenos has a narrative flaw in him that just doesn’t entice me to consider him worth my brainpower or my Warrior of Light’s real antagonism. I’m in the camp that the often looked-over earlier villain Ilberd Feare is a much more personal and exciting villain for the Warrior of Light. He points out their stagnant actions in refusing to help the oppressed nation of Ala Mhigo simply because they’re falling in line with the desensitized priorities of the Eorzean Alliance. That was excellent.

And Zenos constantly quoting Hamilton and throwing special effects at me? Less interesting, less excellent, IMHO. I get enough of that from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

At the time of writing, Zenos is the last of the line of Garlean Emperors. Garlemald, as a nation, is riddled with parallels to real-life empires and fascism. Characters like Gaius Baelsar will wax poetic that cruelty is not all that Garlemald is capable of, but fails to address that the nation he’s so loyal to would need to drastically change for that to be true. After all, Gaius, not everyone is capable of getting a side story series where they quietly take your old sins out back and retcon them into oblivion (Crtl + F, copy-paste into the new search in page bar: “GAIUS VAN BAELSAR & THE XIVTH LEGION”). Zenos and his ennui are the direct results of Garlean evil, which is the natural construct of Ascian evil, which all boils down to that one evil question:

But for Zenos applies a kind of racial blindness to it all because he sees everything that does not fight with its all as inferior to him. If they can’t keep up with him, they might as well be dead. He takes that question and turns it around to

as a blanket question, applied to people, to actions, to orders, to everything.

And that? That bores me to pieces. He might as well be a Golden Age comic book villain named Katana Golfer ranting about how he, the best friend Katana Golfer, wants his perfect hole in one, overlooking that he’ll never get it because he keeps cutting the ball in half.

So Zenos bores me: is there another similar MMO antagonist who doesn’t bore me?

Yes! It’s Arcann from Star Wars: The Old Republic. I love Arcann as a character, even (and maybe especially?) when he’s being an antagonist.

Arcann shares many similarities with Zenos: both are princes of powerful empires, both can meet your player character head to head, both have antagonist tantrums, both are the results of the actions of a dark entity masquerading as an Emperor and grooming whole civilizations for funsies.

What makes Arcann different?

Arcann’s conflict with the player is never about you. It’s never about proving superiority. It’s never about racial or national tensions. Instead, his motivations in every single one of your interactions are the same as your overarching motivations, the same reason you went out into Zakuul space anyway:

Where Zenos got everything handed to him on a golden spoon, laced with glowing blue fantasy gasoline, Arcann has had to fight for everything his whole life. While his story has a flaw in that you have to watch a trailer to understand what’s going on (as none of what is in the trailer is at all communicated inside the game’s narrative itself), Arcann’s story is as much similar to any of the player character stories: he has to fight and claw against everything the Emperor puts out for him.

“You will have nothing. Your privilege is the dirt. In the darkness, only ambition will guide you. The oath you swear, the promises you make, they are yours alone. Your freedom will be the wars you wage. Your birthright? The losses you suffer. Your entitlement? The pain you endure. And when darkness finds you…you will face it alone.”

No, Arcann’s beef with you is never about you. Instead, it’s about his father, who’s using you against your will, no matter if you are Dark or Light.

And that is an angle that excites me as an audience member and makes me want to engage with him.

In 2021, where the real world is fraying due to the actions of people asking, “Is X inferior to me?” I’m tired of that question. Not only as a marginalized person rendered inferior by my gender by those who ask that question…but the frequency of which it is asked and the sight of seeing people answer in turn that “X is inferior, but I’m special” was horrifying to me.

Now, I’m so desensitized to the original question and the fandom romanticization of that question that I am filled with boredom when coming across it. People who do this uncritically get blocked by me.

If I had the power, I would block Zenos. Because he is the punchline of a long cosmic joke crafted by Ascian hands, the very thing that Emet-Selch condemns the entirety of the new reality for: a violent mortal who only sees value in what he can kill and the challenges he can overcome.

Don’t mistake me: I do see value in Zenos’s foil to a player character in an MMO because he characterizes the group of people who play to just rush from challenge to challenge very well. I do understand that about him, from a narrative design perspective. I do enjoy how, in his Stormblood appearances, he directly villainizes white geeks who rant about the perfection of the katana and their preference of taking traditions and things from other cultures (typically Japanese) and making them their own. With the context that this is a character from a Japanese developer, that villianization delighted me, even if it was only for a moment.

But, in the context of a long-term live-service narrative game, I’m bored by that kind of cynical foil used in MMOs. It was exciting in Destiny 2’s Forsaken expansion back in 2018; it was not particularly exciting in Beyond Light in 2020 (especially with Beyond Light’s execution, but that is an entry for another day). It was exciting with Ilberd; it was and is not exciting with Zenos.

I’m hoping that he’ll become more interesting in the hands of Ishikawa for Endwalker’s storyline. Still, I’m also not confident he will, due to being constructed as a character type that I just can only be bored by due to my experience in real life, both in person and on social media.

Arcann, despite being similar to Zenos, entices me because his antagonism, in spite of his ability to casually order his little sister to bomb five planets, is lower scaled than Zenos’s is. Instead, it’s about an inner child wanting vengeance against an abusive father, about a man groomed into a weapon, about the weight of all of that that can have on a single person, brought into dramatic effect by the Force’s influence on the psyche.

A couple of years back, I never gave Arcann the kudos of being one of my favorite Star Wars antagonists, simply because he mirrors a Force-using player character, no matter what circumstances you work with for them, so handily. I will admit that this falls apart depending on your character as the Zakuul-section of the storyline has Problems when handling non-Force using player characters (yet another entry for another day). It’s…a nightmare, honestly, and why when I engage with it narratively, I focus more on my Force users than my non-Force users.

This is genius from a narrative design perspective for a game like SW:tOR that is narratively and mechanically designed around strong character personalities. Think about it: your player character and Arcann are just making do with the cards you have. Both of you are scrambling to get what you want that’s always increasingly out of reach, both because of a certain Emperor’s actions and because of their counterpart’s actions, especially as the actions of one interfere with the other. There’s a strange kindred feeling in that, Arcann is as much thrown into everything against his actual desires as any of my characters are, both as an enemy and later as an eventual optional companion.

It’s some of the most enjoyable paired player-to-NPC conflict writing I’ve ever encountered.

Arcann, however… he’s both a person and a fantasy, all in one. He’s an enemy you can eventually talk down and help see the error of his imperial ways when he’s no longer drowning in a fantasy equivalent of weaponized C-PTSD. He’s a person who is wracked with the same pains you are, who you can bond with over those pains. He’s…safe, even as an antagonist, in ways that I can’t accurately attribute to Zenos.

If I ever meet an Arcann in real life, I feel equipped to handle it. A Zenos? In this economy? No, thank you. Blocked and reported.