HOW SOON DO YOU HAVE TO REVEAL THE MAIN ANTAGONIST?

LockeZ
Standard literary theory suggests introducing all the main characters, including the main antagonist, in the first act. Standard RPG theory suggests spreading your protagonists gradually across the first two thirds of the game, but I think the villain should still show up early on.

A game is much longer than a play or TV show, and it's tempting to save the reveal for later. But the player expects to see, at the beginning of the game, a hook telling him why he should play this game. If that hook is a lie, the player feels betrayed. Though by a lie, I don't just mean a plot twist - I mean that the key motivation for playing the game, the core of your game's goal, was misrepresented. You can say that one thing is minor and the other is major when in truth it's really the other way around, but if you just completely leave out the whole point of the game for the first half of the game, you're gonna have a shitty first half of your game and a bunch of betrayed-feeling players when that second half hits.

In short, that means you should introduce the player to the villain early if at all possible, but you don't necessarily need to reveal that he is the villain.

For example, let's take a very very typical example of an RPG plot: FF7. FF7 is also a good example because it has multiple left-field twists, and because it changes the main villain of the game on you twice - once from the old President Shinra to Rufus at the end of Midgar, and again from Rufus to Sephiroth in the Northern Crater. And yet FF7 has Sephiroth appear - and it's a big appearance - at the end of Midgar, about 25% of the way through the game. You just don't know he's the main villain yet.

This seems like a good way to do it if you want a plot twist main villain. Your evil empire can appear to be the main villain at first and then later get destroyed by demons, but make sure the demons are introduced to the player before that. Your evil usurper viceroy can kill the evil emperor and take his place, but a random dude we've never seen before cannot do so.

Wild ARMs 3 is an example of doing it wrong. 30% of the way through the game, the main villain is revealed. 80% of the way through the game, you kill that guy. And someone else, who you've never seen before, shows up and replaces him. Because you've never seen this person before and it's completely out of left field, this makes it feel like it's a brand new conflict instead of the conclusion of the previous conflict. Instead of feeling like you uncovered the truth, you feel like you should be done with the game.

Meanwhile, Zelda: Skyward Sword doesn't have the main villain appear until part 4 of the final battle. You have heard his name, and you have fought, uh... a giant black blob that is composed of his soul's essence or something? But as a person, he does not appear until the final stage of the final battle. This is different from FF9's stupidity, though, in that this isn't a plot twist. You've know for the entire game exactly who you were fighting. You just spend the entire game trying to keep him sealed, and only at the end do you (predictably) fail. It's not my favorite method, but I think it kinda works. But I'd have preferred if you were trying to keep a power sealed instead of a person, and in the end that power took control of someone who was already part of the story. As it stands, the main villain is essentially not a character. For all intents and purposes, he's just a force, a name, a macguffin. So I felt no hatred for him in the final battle. I only felt hatred for his leiutenant (and for Groose).

You gotta have the big villain do stuff. Not just threaten to do stuff, and not just be revealed to have been secretly responsible all along for stuff. He's gotta personally piss the player off.

I have the main villains appear in the flashback prologue in my mediocre old RM2K3 game, and then again briefly (in a mysterious and ominous scene that provides no useful information) at the end of the second dungeon. After that it's a long time before you see them again - half the game. But the hook is there. And once they do appear, I try (perhaps unsuccessfully) to make them show up enough times that the player can get to know them and start to really hate them. (Though... it could also be argued that the main protagonist is the main villain in that game.)

your entire argument is false and based on games that are just shit.*

^ Proof. ^

Last Scenario's plot is effective both as a story, and as a critique of the bullshit that most everybody is spurting out in this topic (<UPRC> HAVE A BIG BAD, AND AN ACTUALLY-DEVELOPED GUY PLAYING THIS MINION. I HAVE FF GAMES ON AN IV DRIP).

My answer: play good games from start to finish, and then do what you want. Something organic and written well will be successful; something formulaic (without a literary purpose) will not.

Optional extra credit homework assignment:




This game tells one excellent story twice -- there are two realities, and only one character that can traverse between them. And I don't mean WORLD OF LIGHT versus the WORLD OF DARKNESS, I mean the same world where the political power is skewed toward a different nation, or a certain piece of technology fell into different hands, or the plants grew instead of died.

Is there a primary villain? Yes. Do they do stuff? Constantly. Do the other villains do stuff constantly? Yes. Does the story go where it needs to go without focusing on some "RPG VILLAIN STANDARD?" See: Last Scenario.

*(at least story-wise, I have only heard about but not played them)

no

EDIT: I will also say that it's not THE HERO IS THE VILLAIN TROLOLOLOL because while that CAN be effective, just... no. Nope. Hilbert (the MC) does have an intriguing character arc with one of the most interesting final scenes in any game I've played. And no, it's not I HAD A HORRIBLE PAASSSSTTTTTTT. It's actual in-the-present character development.

That is probably what makes LS so successful: it works in the present, where a huge amount of RPGs focus on unplayable, hidden-away backstory. Yes, LS has an important backstory, but it brings it to the forefront and. Just. PLAY THIS GAME

I answered your question!

And here is your description: a young man is told by a mysterious woman that he is the descendant of a great hero. He joins the military in order to fight back against the Empire, all while hearing rumors about demons who live underground...

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/LastScenario?from=Main.LastScenario

There is a main villain in LS and you meet him and know who he is and many hours later you fight him face-to-face.

I'm putting the game forward because of how the primary antagonist is dealt with by world powers, by the party, when he's introduced, how he's introduced, what the smart player might realize when they meet him, and how they know "oh shit, HE IS THE ONE" without him blowing up fifty nuclear reactors or anything silly like that. LS has an entire stable of (excellent) villains, ones who you will cry for and ones that you'll want to kill and ones that are downright horrible people and ones that aren't even human and ones that were helping you all along and yet

they never feel forced. Especially not the primary antagonist. They all maintain an air of mystique and plausibility that is lacking from CECIL

CECIL
HEY CECIL I AM YOUR BROTHER

Moved to Game Design and Theory. This is more of a game development issue than a discussion on RM games.

Kind of weird that you'd claim my points are invalid because I picked shitty games as examples. Since, uh, only one of those three games was even supposed to be an example of my point. The second one was intentionally an example of a shitty game that did it wrong, and the third one was an example of a game that proved me wrong, which I included just to remind people that you can break any rule and still have a good game, if you have a good enough reason.

But I mean I didn't include FF7 as an example because it has the BEST STORY EVER. I just included it as an example because it's really prototypical, and it's hard to say FF7 has a bad enough handling of villains that it objectively ruined the game. It is the most popular RPG story ever, after all. If you emulate it, you won't win any Emmys, but I can at least guarantee you won't create anything that feels too bizarre to be enjoyable.

I'm not sure what your point is with Last Scenario's tons of villains, since villains other than the main villain aren't really relevant to the topic here, except to the extent that the game pretends they're the main villain for a while before revealing 35 hours into the game that OH NO THEY WERE JUST A PAWN OF THIS SUPERNATURAL ENTITY THAT IS GOING TO ANNIHILATE REALITY IN ORDER TO CLEANSE THE WORLD OF CHAOS

which I'm beyond sick of by the way, it was awful the first time and increasingly awful each successive time since then

Heh. Well, my second paragraph is a reaction to being pissed off by things like Xenogears and Lost, where it starts out tricking you into thinking that the story is a completely different genre than it really ends up suddenly turning into 30 hours later. You get some stories where the real conflict is revealed really late, and it has absolutely nothing to do with what hooked you into the story, and the things that hooked you in just disappear without a trace.

author=slashphoenix
If you want the plot to be villain-centric, it makes little sense to wait until the end to introduce the villain.

This is an important distinction, I suppose. Some stories are all about the heroes, and some stories are about the villains too. And then some stories are almost entirely about the villains, and some stories are just about the events. You'd handle the introduction of the villain differently in each of these.

As others have wisely pointed out, one big antagonist should not be the only driving force of the plot; he/she/it belongs to a larger world, which, to come across as believable, is full of conflict and drama everywhere. The villains are a part of that world, and live by its ever-changing rules.

Take the real life historical figure of Ching Shih (1775–1844); she was a Cantonese prostitute who was captured by and married Zheng Yi, a notorious pirate. After her husband's death in 1807, she used her influence and her cunning to maneuver her way into leadership of the fleet, establishing a hegemony over coastal villages, imposing taxes and demanding 'protection' money, among other pirate practices. She was known for her brilliant tactics and extreme brutality, and was feared throughout China. When the power of her fleet grew too great, the entire Chinese navy was sent against her, along with the Portuguese and the British; Ching Shih decisively defeated them all. Finally, she and all of the pirates in her fleet were granted amnesty in 1810, and she retired with her loot and her husband (her former lieutenant) and her son Cheung Po Tsai. She opened a gambling house (most likely not without a sense of irony) and died in 1844, at the age of 69. She was one of the most successful pirates of all time.

Now, doesn't Ching Shih sound like she'd make a great antagonist for the heroes? Would anyone who met her back when she was a prostitute ever imagine her rise to power? She did not exist in a vacuum; like any ambitious individual, she keenly saw the world around her and took advantage of her circumstances. What makes her a villain is that she had no qualms about brutalizing or extorting the weak, as she herself had seen how cruel the world was towards the powerless. While her crimes were on her own head, she justified her actions within her historical, economic and geographic context; they had as much to do with her path in life as her gifts.

So, my advice to anyone wondering when to reveal the antagonist is this; is there a reason why such a character would emerge from the story you are writing, and, if so, is that reason believable? Most real-world villains don't want to destroy the world because they are manic depressive misanthropes (or, if they do, they likely don't have much economic or political influence); they want money, power, respect and a sense of 'winning' at life. Many of the most horrible people in history seek these goals while forming elaborate justifications for their behaviour, rationalizing the cruelty of the world, creating scapegoats, etc. The context for such characters is all-important, as it dictates if and how these individuals will have an opportunity to bring their ambitions to fruition, and the consequences to others if they should succeed in doing so.

When thinking about the setting for your game world, consider what forces of change are at work politically and economically, and how both the heroes and the villains fit into those conflicts; you will be surprised how fast the motivations of your characters become believable and organic.

One last bit of advice, which is some of the best writing advice I've ever received; don't force the plot. If you want the story to go one way, but everything you've written up to that point is going another, cut the strings and let the story take its course. If your characters have grown naturally from a world in motion, they will tell you what to write sooner or later.

The answer is what helps answer a far more important question: Why should the player care about the conflict in the narrative? Focus on that instead and answers to questions like this will fall into place much better.