Some characters work, and some don't. When a character that doesn't work keeps hanging around a story, and especially a video game, you have a recipe for frustration. Game characters can go bad in a lot of ways, ranging from poorly balanced enemies to flat-out irritating concepts. Here's a rogue's gallery of the eight worst, most annoying game characters ever to cross Nintendo hardware. These are guys who ruined good games or turned great games into exercises in controller-breaking frustration. I hate them to degrees not comprehensible by mortal man.
Shadow the Hedgehog
Plenty of intelligent people have written plenty of furious screeds against Shadow the Hedgehog for a variety of reasons, but here's mine. You know what's wrong with Shadow the Hedgehog? Hit DeviantArt or Fanfiction.net and you'll find plenty of people drawing shitty pictures and writing shitty stories about the exact same character. They're not stealing him, it's just that every terrible Sonic the Hedgehog fan-character is some variation on a hipper-than-thou, highly angsty and tortured palette-swap hedgehog.
The only thing worse than a character ridiculous enough to easily pass for a fourteen-year-old's Gary Stu being pushed as the star of his own game by Sega is the simple fact that Shadow is terribly redundant. The Sonic extended cast already had a bad guy who was the dark mirror version of Sonic, namely Metal Sonic. Hey, remember back when Metal Sonic was a big deal? Remember how he never does a damn thing anymore? I wonder if Shadow's debut between then and now has anything to do with it!
Sure, Shadow can do double duty as a bad guy and a whiny protagonist, but he's sort of half-assed at both. I'd much rather Knuckles as the conflicted tweener of the Sonic cast and Metal Sonic as the super-bad Sonic-alike. Oh, wait, Knuckles also never gets to do a damn thing anymore, these days...
Tom Nook
Tom Nook is a dick.
That's the beginning and end of my problem with him. In Animal Crossing on the DS, the first thing Tom Nook does is give you a house that leaves you millions of bells in debt to him. Hey, no problem! It just so happens that Tom Nook can give you lots of work that'll help you earn bells... that you use to pay Tom Nook.
This guy is a serious, straight-up loan shark, but thanks to the way Animal Crossing is programmed, there's no escape from his iron grip. Fully enjoying the game means appeasing Tom Nook's lust for power, and then maybe you get to have some fun.
Go to hell, Tom Nook.
Birds
There is no retro video game where seeing a bird onscreen shouldn't fill you with unreasoning terror, but the game that gave all video avians a bad name is undoubtedly Ninja Gaiden. Birds are to the NES Ninja Gaiden what assholes with rocket launchers are to the 360 Ninja Gaiden, only without the dignity of knowing it took guys with rocket launchers to beat you. No, in NES Ninja Gaiden you get to know that you're getting your ass kicked by random eagles. The guys with rocket launchers are cake compared to the damned birds.
The specific level that likely calls up the unending agony of birds is undoubtedly Stage 3, which was easy enough to get to and yet where most people gave up. The level's design blended tricky platforming with bird enemies who would swoop down at you and keep diving back and forth unless you killed them or quickly scrolled them offscreen. Many jumps were designed such that getting hit by a bird would be instant death, and there's a few places in the level where one mistake means two or three birds dive-bombing you at once.
I shudder to think how many NES controllers were flung, bashed, or generally destroyed because of those goddamn birds.
Flea Men
Aurrghghbargh.
Flea Men are the most horrible bastards that the Castlevania series has to offer (yes, worse than Medusa Heads). They show up around Stage 11 of the NES Castlevania, and seem simple enough. Mega Man-style birds fly across the screen, and the Flea Men are what they drop. If you kill them right away, no problem. If you don't... oh, God help you if you don't.
Then the Flea Men begin hopping back and forth rapidly in a pattern that makes them hard to kill and hard to avoid. A screenful of hopping Flea Men is pretty much instant death for Simon, and protagonists of later Castlevanias aren't much better off. Yes, they've got more weapons to use, but by then Flea Men are wearing armor and riding bizarre mounts and doing all sorts of new annoying things.
To my mind, the Flea Men are a far greater irritant than the Birds simply because there's no end to them in sight. They've been in every recent 2D Castlevania I can think of, and I'm sure they'll be roaming around in Order of Ecclesia to give me new headaches. I'm not sure if they've ever been in the 3D Castlevanias, but... seriously, who cares?
Phanto
Hnnnggah.
Phanto is one of the few Mario enemies who seems to have appeared in exactly one game, Super Mario Bros. 2. His role was simple: whenever you found a room with a key in it, Phanto was there. When you took the key, Phanto awakened and chased you.
Doesn't sound bad? Well, bear in mind, Phanto would chase you pretty much forever, until you opened the locked door you needed the key for, or until you killed him. The easiest way to kill him was by chucking your key at him... but if you missed, then Phanto was all over your ass and you also suddenly didn't have your key.
If your aim was bad or you were using Toad, your key might end up riding around on the back of an enemy or dropping down a pit. If you killed Phanto but lost your key in the process, then screw you-- go back and get it again, complete with another Phanto on your ass. In some levels, this could become a never-ending cycle of suffering.
Navi
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And people wonder why I don't like Ocarina of Time more.
Tabuu
I almost want to crown this guy the biggest disappointment of 2008, but hey, we've still got six months of things to disappoint us! Seriously, though, the end battle for Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the game with the psychotic two-year hype cycle, is... a naked guy with butterfly wings? Wha? Seriously, that's it, Nintendo? That's all you've got?
It'd be one thing if he was otherwise an interesting boss, but he fails on just about every level. Like a lot of lousy fighting game end bosses, he relies on having abilities that the basic player characters can't access. That just feels all kinds of cheap. He also has a lot of instant kill moves, which are both cheap and make a boss feel boring. What, couldn't think of how to design an actual challenge? Instead, you want to make sure we don't get out of Adventure Mode without using the Dodge moves that are otherwise never required there?
Even if you allow that it's okay for a fighter to end with a gimmick boss battle, Tabuu's gimmicks are really much lamer than the ones that came before. Come on, how much better were the Ridley and Meta-Ridley fights? Even the fight with the giant Pokemon boss felt more memorable. Tabuu just felt like a tacked-on, obligatory boss-shaped thing put there because they otherwise couldn't think of how to end Adventure Mode. When the rest of Brawl is so spectacular, that makes Tabuu feel unforgivably lame.
Yellow Devil
HNNGAAHHHRGH.
I've written before about how Mega Man was a merciless meatgrinder of a game, but let's say for the sake of argument that you slogged it out and cleared the six Robot Masters. Let's say you struggle through the first bits of Dr. Wily's castle. Then, out of nowhere, comes this ten-ton bastard to cancel your Christmas.
The Yellow Devil is like this insidious wall of death. If a developer's sheer hatred for the player's desire to advance could manifest as an in-game object, it would be a Yellow Devil. This bastard's gimmick was simple and yet truly horrible. He appears on one side of the screen, and you have a few seconds to shoot him in the eye. Then brick by horrible brick he flies to the other side of the screen, forcing you to jump-dodge your way through. Any single too-high jump sends you flying into an upper block, which dishes out nasty hitstun and totally throws off your rhythm. Yellow Devil reassembles, and you've got a few more seconds to hit him-- and then the whole horrible process starts over again.
You could try to squeeze your way through Yellow Devil with degenerate tactics. Use the Elec Bolt, let it hit Yellow Devil in the eye, and then hammer the Pause button like you were playing a 2P Mario game with your annoying cousin and you really wanted to fuck up one of his jumps. The game will have a little seizure and count multiple hits from the Elec Bolt, and you can one-shot Yellow Devil like this. If you do, though, you'll always be left wondering if you could've beaten him for real. That empty, hollow feeling inside is like Yellow Devil's hatred for you stretching into infinity.
