Throughout gaming history, we have been blessed with some wonderful characters, but everything must have its opposite. For every character we grow to love, there will be one who gamers just wish had never been thought of. Bosses that seem to be invincible, worthless allies who cannot do anything for themselves, supposed sidekicks who we just want to kick up the backside – followed by a swift beheading… they’re all there, and they all annoy the ever-loving crap out of us.
From the infamous to the much lesser known, get your stress ball out, because this motley crew just do not know when to leave you alone.
10. Belethor (The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim))
He may be one of the minor players on this list, but he is certainly one of the most annoying. Belethor runs the general good store in Whiterun, the city of Skyrim where, for many players, the adventure begins. Some buy their first home there, so it’s nice to know there’s a store close by where you can sell your sundries for a reasonable price, right?
Wrong. Belethor is a first-class jerk with an inflated ego and even more inflated prices. Everything he says is laced with sarcasm at best, and blunt rudeness at worst. “If I had a sister I’d sell her in a second” comes to mind as a pure gem from this charming pillar of society, but it’s not only his own family he doesn’t seem to have a care for. You can ask most people in the game why they ended up in the province of Skyrim, but Belethor’s answer is: “the most compelling feature of this frozen wasteland is the volley of inane questions leveled at me on a regular basis”. There are other vendors all over the place that you can go to, but when you live in the same city as this guy, you really do have to weigh up whether killing him is worth the jail time. I reckon it is.
9. Roman Bellic (Grand Theft Auto IV)
Ah, Niko’s cousin Roman. He’s like the drunken guy at the party: he is fun for a little while, but you really don’t want to be dumped with him for the rest of the night. His overly chummy demeanour really started to grate on me after approximately ten minutes. And he just will not leave Niko alone. Driving to pick up your hot date for the night? Not likely my friend, Roman’s calling to see if you want to go bowling. It wouldn’t be so bad if Roman himself hadn’t been dropping hints about Niko getting on with his life and settling down with a nice woman.
Oh, and there’s the part about how he told Niko he was living the life of luxury in Liberty City, when in fact he owns a taxi rank and his home is a crappy flat. And then there are all those loan sharks from whom Niko now has to protect his worthless cousin. For someone looking for a fresh start after a pretty hard life, Niko gets really badly screwed over by Roman.
8. Crystal and Amber Bailey (Dead Rising 2)
There’s only one thing worse than a ridiculously hard boss level, and that is one with two bosses. A lot of the psychopaths in Dead Rising 2, whilst difficult for protagonist Chuck to take down, are not particularly annoying. A man in a gimp suit with a giant pink chainsaw is not too much of a problem. A young mascot with a giant plastic head, on roller skates, dual-wielding flamethrowers is actually relatively easy to take down. Two glamorous sisters with large swords? Nigh on impossible to defeat.
The problem doesn’t come from the shuffling zombies who accidentally stumble into this epic battle: they’re just a side-show. The issue is that, as you try and deal with one of the murderous sisters, the other will slice your back like sashimi. They might not have been quite so annoying if they hadn’t mocked Chuck for his disappointing performances, both in his zombie-killing game show and, implicitly, with other women. They’re faster than him, probably better armed than him, and they hate his guts. But the real kicker comes once you do somehow manage to bring one of them down, because the other sister commits suicide. You don’t even get the satisfaction of killing them both.
7. Devil Jin (Tekken 6)
Tekken 6 is a wonderful game with some truly great characters. However, it brings with it from its predecessor one of the most annoying fighters to be conceived: Devil Jin. Whilst Jin himself is nothing special in many ways, his demonic counterpart is arrogant, evil and cheap in his fighting. In what is essentially a hand-to-hand – and crucially ground-based – fighting game, he has wings. They come in pretty handy with his plethora of uncounterable attacks, and they’re also quite useful when he wants to be a coward, and run to the other side of the stage, far away from his opponents. From where he can use his eye beam.
Once more, for effect: he can shoot laser beams from his face. In what universe is that fair in a combat game?! Just to make him more annoying to fight, he can do this from the sky, because – did I mention this already? – Devil Jin has wings. Just to add insult to injury, all his aerial moves start in the same way, so even if you try and counter it, you won’t know which spine-shattering attack is coming until it’s too late, and he is force-choking your character’s corpse in the post-battle cut scene.
6. Princess Peach (the Mario franchise)
What does Mario have to do to stop his girlfriend from being kidnapped? It seems like he barely has five minutes to put his feet up, stick the kettle on and read the paper before Bowser goes and does it yet again. I’m not quite sure what is wrong with Peach, but my God she is annoying as hell, chiefly because of the regularity with which this seems to happen. Could she not avoid getting captured every single time she walks out of her front door? And it is always up to poor old Mario to go and save her irritating ass. Super Mario 64 saw her inviting him round for cake (sure, that’sexactly what she was after), only for him to find that Peach had managed to get herself capturedinside her own castle.
Theories abound that she is in fact in love with Bowser himself, and that every time you are controlling Mario, you are in fact carrying out another high-profile kidnapping yourself: Bowser’s traps are merely ever-increasing levels of security against the persistent plumber. Even so, maybe Peach could give Mario some kind of hint that she just isn’t that into him?
5. Your Rival (Pokémon Red/Blue)
It is one of the great feelings of Pokémon: defeating the Elite Four and hearing Lance, the dragon master, say those wonderful words, before getting a harsh reality check: “You are now the Pokémon league Champion! Or, you would have been, but you have one more challenge ahead. You have to face another trainer!”
No, surely not… but yes, it was true. Few things were more annoying in these otherwise fantastic games than knowing that your rival had already done everything you accomplish. There is a good reason why his grandfather, the great Professor Oak, clearly preferred you, the player, to him, and why the first thing to come to mind when naming him at the beginning of the game was usually “Douche”. For someone who was generally pretty easy to pummel into the ground, he always had to be one step ahead, and he was never averse to letting you know it. He would happily jump out and battle you when you least expect it, before you’ve had a chance to check out where you are on your town map… which he specifically told his sister not to give to you.
4. Natalya (GoldenEye 007)
Several annoying characters spring to mind when one mentions the chilling words “escort mission”, but few compare to Natalya, the walking bullet magnet from GoldenEye 007. Throughout the course of the game, you have to find, rescue, escape with and protect this liability of a human being no fewer than seven times. However, the escort mission is the real killer.
It seems simple: walk one woman through a building, taking out occasional guards and avoiding some automated security systems. How hard can that be for James Bond? The answer is enormously when you include Natalya in the equation. She will readily run away from you with gay abandon, right into a hail of gunfire. She has literally no survival instincts: she wants to die. Don’t try and help her, though – apparently, pumping the back of her head full of bullets is not allowed, which seems strange considering her startling death wish.
3. The Dog (Duck Hunt)
Nobody likes to be mocked when things do not go their way, least of all by man’s best friend. This infamous, annoying little cur really took liberties in Duck Hunt, sniggering to himself like Muttley when you missed a shot. It didn’t matter whether you had previously hit one duck or fifty: this guy would judge you for it. As everyone reading this will know, the most annoying thing about him was the reason he could laugh at you, when you were holding a rifle, in the first place: he cannot be killed. More than anything, most people, tired of the dog’s consistent derision, dearly wanted to blow him into the middle of next week and make him into dog food, but alas, it was not to be (at least until later VS arcade releases). Aside from those, we have to endure his sniggering face at every missed shot.
2. Elena Fisher (the Uncharted series)
Usually, when the protagonist of a game gets a sidekick of any kind, they would surely expect that person to help them. Nathan Drake, therefore, should seriously reconsider his taste in women. Elena Fisher is cursed by the double whammy of disturbing levels of ineptitude, coupled with a really, really annoying voice. Every door Nate wants to go through when she is around is locked from the other side, meaning an arduous trek for our hero, usually involving climbing sheer cliff faces and killing dozens of people at the same time, whilst Elena stands around admiring the view and being judgemental towards the poor guy.
I’ve yet to see her actually kill a mercenary – and let’s be honest; Nate has plenty of enemies to choose from. Almost every major antagonist brings several small armies to take care of the intrepid explorer, yet when confronted with a horde of gunmen, Elena turns from a feisty, independent woman into someone with the marksmanship of an Imperial Stormtrooper, and absolutely no bravado. She just hides behind walls yelling “NATE!” over and over again. Yes, Elena, I can see the several thousand people with automatic weapons advancing towards us. How about you shout at me a little less, and help me deal with them for a change?
1. Navi (The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time)
Ah yes, the consummate annoying character rears her ugly… umm, fuzzy sphere of light, once again. Never have the words “Hey! Listen!” induced so much rage. You can’t go five minutes in Hyrule without Navi telling you some mundane piece of information about something you already know or have already done. She will regularly let Link know of the places she thinks they should go on their quest, despite someone else having already mentioned it to him a few minutes of gameplay ago.
She may have been relatively useful when it came to Z-targeting, but that was literally all the irritating little fairy was good for. Even then she’s not exactly the perfect combative companion: in the final boss battle – the one fight where Link might actually want some help – she can do nothing because Ganondorf is too evil. Thanks, Navi. Thanks for absolutely nothing… except maybe the heightened ability to kill enemies due to the red mist that descends on account of her incessant chatter. By the time Twilight Princess came about, Navi had been relegated to a mere cursor. And it was the best thing that ever happened to her.
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