5 Characters Who Ruined Your Favorite Game

When you’re playing through a great game, there’s nothing worse than running into a character who is immediately annoying. You’re having a great time, and this person comes through to bring the mood down instantly. Even if a game is great by nearly every other measure, that one character can tank your enjoyment, especially if they happen to be a major character who pops up frequently. The list below includes five such characters, though it’s important to note these are far from the only terrible characters in otherwise excellent games.

Here are five characters who ruined great games.

5) The Calypso Twins – Borderlands 3

Borderlands 3 might just have the best moment-to-moment gameplay in the series’ history. Toss in one of the better end games developer Gearbox Software has ever come up with, and you have a game that should have been a smash success, pulling in massive sales and end-of-the-year awards.

Unfortunately, the characters and humor in BL3 go far beyond grating. These are some of the most annoying NPCs you’ll ever meet, and the main antagonists, the Calpyso Twins, are the worst of the bunch. It gets so bad that you’re better off muting Borderlands 3 and just enjoying the looter shooter gameplay without everything else.

4) Preston Garvey – Fallout 4

Fallout 4‘s base-building mechanic is a love-it-or-hate-it feature. Some players will take to it and spend hundreds of hours building their wasteland survival shelter. Others will quickly realize how boring it is, but still spend dozens of hours making a pointless base because that Platinum trophy is really important.

Preston Garvey falls into the former camp. The leader of the Minutemen will constantly ask you to go help out other settlements. He wants to rebuild not just his community, but the entirety of the wasteland. That’s an admirable goal, but Garvey is so pushy that he barely feels like a person. He’s just a walking and talking message board that represents the absolute worst of Bethesda’s quest design in FO4.

3) Meta Knight – Super Smash Bros. Brawl

Meta Knight makes this list for a very different reason than everyone else. The rest of these characters are different shades of annoying, who drag down their respective games, making you wish you were playing anything else. Meta Knight does that too, but for a completely different season.

See, in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Meta Knight is so overpowered that anytime you come up against him, you know you aren’t going to have fun. Sure, if it’s a casual game its not too bad, but if somebody joins your party who knows their Brawl, you’ll quickly be shutting down said party, with everyone agreeing to never invite the Meta Knight guy next time.

2) Ashley Graham – Resident Evil 4

To be fair to Ashley, she is much more capable in the Resident Evil 4 remake. In the original? Not so much. She is one of the worst examples of the damsel in distress stereotype, who can’t do much for herself, forcing the player to coddle her through sections of the game.

Look, Resident Evil 4 is the second-best piece of media featuring a pretty boy hanging out with the president’s daughter (shoutout to Will Friedle’s My Date with the President’s Daughter from 1999), but that doesn’t make Ashley any less annoying. Again, you have to give them credit for mostly fixing it a few decades later; however, this was one of the major blemishes on one of the better games of the era.

1) Roman Bellic – Grand Theft Auto 4

“Cousin! Come bowl with me!” I’m sure Roman Bellic is a nice fella, but hearing him buzz my cell phone constantly over the course of Grand Theft Auto 4 made me truly hate him. He’s always asking you to come with him to activities, which wouldn’t be too bad, but I’d also like to play the video game I bought, not babysit this weird Serbian man.

On top of the constant need for my attention, Roman is incompetent at just about everything he tries to do. He’s not just annoying me with his neediness; he’s also directly causing problems that I then have to solve. Sure, that’s kind of the point. GTA 4 needs a way to drive its plot forward, but putting so much of it on Niko’s sad sack of a cousin just makes me like him less.

I’m sure many players would love to see someone like Navi from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time take this top spot, but Roman makes my blood boil even more. He’s the worst (best?) version of the annoying sidekick trope, and you better believe I picked the GTA 4 ending where he dies every time.

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