Ranking The Main Antagonists of CC
Hello! Remember the poll I posted a bit ago asking you guys to vote on what I should make a post ranking? Well, although it was a super close race, the option about ranking the main antagonists won! Thank you to everyone who voted, this was very fun to write! Now, onto the countdown, where I’ll be starting from the worst and going to the best. And remember, I’m not defending any of these characters, and also, this is just my personal opinion. And obviously, huge spoilers for all of the games.
Also, another note: the wiki considers both Lawson and Horatio Rochester to be the main antagonists of MotP, but I only picked Lawson to rank, since he’s the final boss of the game, so to speak. I feel like if I included Horatio, I’d also have to include Rozetta, since she’s the main/overarching villain for like 50-80% of The Conspiracy, depending on what districts you count. (Although, to be fair, Denise was the mastermind behind the mastermind, while Lawson and Horatio were enemies and not connected to each other/manipulating each other, so maybe it’s different , but….too late, I’m only including Lawson lol sorry Horatio you didn’t take control over Concordia the way Lawson did.)
Anyways!
8. Hector Montoya/El Rey, Save the World/World Edition
It was a very close tie between him and the next person on the list, but I ultimately decided to go with Hector, because he commits the worst crime a character can commit: he is so boring. I remember almost nothing about him, and to add insult to injury, the original El Rey is WAY more interesting! I’d totally play a game about the original El Rey starting SOMBRA and dodging assassination attempts by the CIA after giving the US an excuse to invade a sovereign country (especially considering that sounds very much like a Cold War-era plot, and I love history), rather than Hector saying, “My parents died in a house fire but I didn’t, so I’m superior.” I honestly couldn’t tell you much about Hector, and I consider it to be a massive cop-out the way he’s revealed. Arsenio tells us that El Rey is someone we’ve met before (as in, like the previous case), and then North America is spent thinking, “Ooh, who is it?” Only for Hector to \ show up in the second to last case, kill the Canadian PM (in a very contrived and stupid way…why does the PRIME MINISTER have literally no security), and be like “hey, I’m El Rey.” Um…shocking? Dude, I barely know you; it would’ve been a lot more impactful if a character we properly KNEW was El Rey—Ripley would’ve been a great choice, or maybe Natasha, or someone who had appeared more than twice before they were unmasked-- and had someone without a weak, underdeveloped backstory. I got beef with the next few villains, but at least they give me something. El Rey gives me practically nothing, and a boring, underwhelming character is worse than one who ticks me off or who has stuff I can actually criticize. I’m glad El Rey mostly ended the trend of the main villain not showing up until near the very end of the game, because that’s such a lame cop-out.
But after disappearing, that trend kind of returned with…
7. The Demon Queen, Supernatural Investigations
Sort of. I will say that the DQ’s presence is felt by the halfway point in the game, and I do think that she serves as a very intimidating threat, especially once released…. until Hope defeats her WAY too easily in a severely anticlimactic scene. But extremely lame death aside, she is properly threatening, and I was way more afraid of her than the nebulous “El Rey,” but other than that….she’s got few things going for her. She’s a pure evil character, which can be fun, but we don’t meet her in person until the end of the game, even if we certainly feel her threat and the urgency to stop her. The thing with her taking form of Jacob’s dead wife is a neat psychological torture, and I won’t count Jacob’s utter stupidity in thinking that, even though she was just shapeshifting into his wife, she…was his wife, even though Jacob buried his wife, and this causing Jacob to sentence the entire human race to death to join someone who looked like his wife (guess he never met any shapeshifters or something) against the DQ, although I do think it would be way more interesting if she actually was Jacob’s wife (and his actions would make a lot more sense, too). But although the rebellion against her is interesting lore, her being basically the devil and therefore pure evil makes her a little dull, and the only reason that she’s above El Rey is because she has a more developed backstory, and her presence was more threatening and felt more throughout the game, and at least she was the final boss of the game, rather than being defeated the case before.
The next person may have not been defeated in the case before the end of the game, but he still barely appeared, and it’s….
6. Albert Tesla, Pacific Bay
Okay, first of all, I will admit. Part of the reason why Tesla is so low is because his plan to upload people into a digital utopia after bombing/destroying Pacific Bay/the world (the game says both, if I remember correctly, but he only bombs PB) reminds me of Sword Art Online, and I DESPISE that show.
But I also have genuine writing problems with him, too. Once again, he barely appears in the game, making his first case appearance in the second to last case, although he is at least mentioned in the first case of The Wastes. I appreciate his connection to one of the main characters (although he wasn’t influencing Frank until the very end of the game), and his plan matches the sci-fi nature of Pacific Bay. I hate the ending of Pacific Bay, but mostly because of how it absolves Frank of any wrongdoing and brushes his crimes, including killing a teenager, under the rug, but honestly, Tesla’s not one of the biggest problems I have with the game//its ending, although his death is really stupid. You can’t kill him by shooting him once, but he’ll go down if you shoot him twice! Uh, okay.
But at least Tesla was directly manipulating and controlling one of the main characters, but not as much as….
5. Milton Grimmes, Grimsborough
Despite being near the halfway point of the list, Grimmes is still not great. Very hit or miss. He’s extremely evil, obviously. And I very much appreciate that he has a direct connection to Chief King, an influence/blackmail/threats that lasted far before we showed up and directly affects King’s actions in Maple Heights and to a lesser extent, the rest of the game (or at least the Financial Center, I’d imagine). I do feel like it’s a little dramatic for Stuart to say that the Crimson Order was responsible for all the evilness and murders in Grimsborough, considering the gangs, Margaret Littlewood, and Tess were perfectly fine sowing death and destruction without any help, but there certainly was rot at the heart of Grimsborough, going very high up.
On a side note, is it just me, or does anyone else think Martha Price was part of the Crimson Order? It’s implied that both political parties were being backed by the same organization in Adam’s case, or at least were working together (as Martha and Howard Johnson were given copies of practically identical speeches to read in the case of either of them winning, with just their names and the two things they ran their platform on being different, and I find Martha's excuse of "we happened to hire the same speech consultant" to be highly suspicious) and the mayor was part of the CO, plus I HIGHLY doubt we arrested EVERYONE in the CO….We probably just arrested the leaders and the people who directly murdered people in Airport….
But anyways, now for the elephant in the room: Grimmes is very uncomfortably, violently racist to a genocidal degree. Now, I understand what the game was attempting to do in Airport/with him. They were attempting to deconstruct the Thanksgiving myth by showing that the settlers in Grimsborough were colonizers who committed genocide against the Aloki. Defying a huge lie of history taught to American children is important. Where it all falls apart, though, is that the Aloki are HORRIBLY written. The Aloki aren’t a tribe in real life, and so basically, the game just mashed as many stereotypes of Native Americans as they could into Airport, and it just ages worse and worse as the years go on. They game is trying to be on the side of the Aloki, and Grimmes being a genocidal maniac with a God complex was their tool to try to do that, but when you’re repeating stereotype after stereotype about Native Americans in your story, it comes off as EXTREMELY tone deaf. The game was not trying to be racist and was trying to show the evil of the colonizers, but it was executed poorly, and although he’s a heinous villain, Grimmes is still not terribly interesting, only shows up in the second to last case, and leads an organization that shows up in the game out of nowhere. The reason he’s about Tesla is that I can appreciate that they were trying to show a historical lie to be, well, a lie, and I like that he was holding an influence over a main character throughout the entire game, but the execution could’ve been way, way better.
And it’s sad that, after we take down Grimmes and his racist death cult, the Aloki (and the Amish) are nowhere to be seen in The Conspiracy. Given how populated and industrialized the city is after five years, plus the fact that DreamLife gets a whole district to themselves, pretty much, in Misty Grove, and the Historical Center lost tons of land (probably is just now the little section of Old Town we see), plus the fact that, as I said, I suspect Martha Price was part of the CO, or at least involved in shady dealings, I would not be surprised if she had a hand in throwing out the Aloki and Amish out of their homeland in order to make room for more industrialization, population growth, and money (and having Joe Warren by her side encouraging her to clear out the Historical Center to make way for a huge DreamLife dome probably helped, too).
Speaking of the conspiracy in, well, The Conspiracy…
4. Denise Daniels, The Conspiracy
We have finally reached the villains that actually show up before the last or second to last district of the game. Yay!
Denise is despicable, there’s no doubt about it. I don’t actually like her. Hell, she’s very hateable! She’s a raging psychopath with the blood of hundreds on her hands, enjoyed playing God, and what she did with Otto was especially horrific. I don’t like Denise at all! But she’s this high on the list because I think she is a dang effective villain with clear influence throughout the game, and, while she isn’t in the game much until Newmark, does show up a few times before the end of the game. I mean, all of the heinous shit that Rozetta does in the game was because she was working with/for Denise, building the dome, human experimentation, making the serum, etc, etc, etc. Don’t get me wrong, Rozetta is responsible for everyone she murdered and also has the blood of hundreds on her hands, but most of her crimes were done to work together with her mother so them and Rozetta’s friends could rule the world. As much as Rozetta being allergic to accountability irritates me, her line of “If my mother had been a proper mother to me, none of this would’ve happened!” does make you think. If Rozetta had been raised by a normal mother/normal parents, she honestly might’ve turned out way different. Nature vs nurture and all. The rest of Ad Astra don’t have any excuse though. They’re all just evil, especially Bateman, and fed off each others’ nastiness, narcissism, and classism. Especially Bateman. That dude was just blatantly a sociopath. He was probably gonna kill someone one day no matter what.
But this isn’t about Rozetta. Playing the game, especially replaying it, shows you how much Denise’s influence, shadow, and presence is everywhere, and I appreciate that about a main villain. I also love stories where villains are out-villained and being hunted down by a greater, more evil villain while the former villains are terrified and have been betrayed, and that’s exactly what Denise does with Ad Astra. I wish I had gone into The Conspiracy blind, because I would’ve loved to originally experience seeing Dr. Noorani say that Louis was killed because Ad Astra had outlived their usefulness, he was the most troublesome so he had to die first, and that there was a greater evil afoot that made Ad Astra look like “clowns,” and that they were not our real enemy.
And finally, Denise has my second favorite death out of all of the main villains. Made an army of invincible neohumans to supersede the weak, inferior human race, but failed to realize that she was part of that inferior human race (I like how she also wears glasses, proof that she needs a vision aid because her eyes are “inferior,” so to speak, despite all her talk—and that’s not a knock against people with glasses, my vision is awful), and was then tied up and beheaded by her most advanced creation that she’d been abusing in several different ways. It’s extremely poetic and cathartic. Perfect! Even if Otto…went on to kill hundreds. So he’s certainly a villain, too, even if I don’t consider him to be the main antagonist of the game.
One of the only three main villains who didn’t die, however, would be…
3. Eleonora Macron, Paris/City of Romance
Oh, hey, look, it’s the highest COR will ever get on any list ever (besides maybe main menu music). This is also where a HUGE jump in quality occurs. I don’t really like or care for anyone below this ranking (yeah, some of the main villains in CC aren’t that great), but at this point in the list is where I actively start to like the characters.
Yeah, I know Eleonora is kinda just “evil Giulietta,” but honestly, that’s a cool concept: a mobster’s daughter who DIDN’T opt to make different choices than her father. And she really played everyone, she was SMART, she had a long-game plan to get together with a traitor to her father/brother of a police officer, and it nearly worked out. I like that she has the most realistic motive since Lawson; she doesn’t want to kill off the human race or destroy the world or change timelines. She just wants to take over France with her mobster father. Honestly, I respect the “simplicity.” Honestly, deepfake videos like she and Samy were scheming sounds like something that could definitely happen in the future to make fake stuff about political figures to gain power/beat them in races.
And I like that despite being a villain, she loved her father. She was furious that Samy dared to try to take his place, and yet didn’t necessarily want to take her father’s place herself. It seems like she was perfectly fine helping her dad without actually trying to undermine him. He probably saw her as his “heir,” obviously, and she likely would’ve been given a significant amount of political power, but I think it’s more interesting that she genuinely loved her father and was loyal to him, not planning on being a backstabber to gain more power for herself. Although her plan to romance, marry, and eventually kill Cody was cold, I think that her tears when her father died were genuine. She probably wouldn’t have been so careless in personally killing Samy if she wasn’t so angry and mourning her father.
Honestly, she would’ve been amazing in a proper game, with 30-60 cases, as a recurring character who slowly developed a good romance with another recurring character, someone who we grew to like and trust over the game, before turning on us at the end, being revealed to have an evil plan cooking the whole time, revealed to be the main antagonist the whole time. A huge, gut punch of a betrayal would’ve been amazing with proper writing. Kind of like…
2. Justin Lawson, Mysteries of the Past
Well, he wasn’t evil the whole time. But even better: he, to quote Obi-Wan Kenobi, “became the very thing [he] swore to destroy.”
And who doesn’t love a fallen hero?
I’ll get my one and only complaint out of the way before I start praising Lawson: I do think his turn to the dark side is a little sudden, from our perspective at least. While I do think that there was a lot bubbling under the surface we didn’t see, it makes the turn come off as a little abrupt, and while I don’t necessarily think it’s out of character, I can see why people might say it is. And unfortunately, this sudden turn does lead to some people theorizing that he was evil all along, which I…disagree with. But it would’ve been better if we had seen more cracks in him, so to speak, a more clear sliding towards extremism, especially in Ivory Hill when fighting against the Rochesters. Yes, there is that little bit of Lawson being furious that Archie is getting away with being Mr. Alastor, but other than that, the game is lacking moments where we see his anger at justice failing. I personally think that his prison sentences should’ve gotten harsher and harsher as the game went on, and have him maybe be more antagonistic towards Diego, distrusting him throughout the entire game, or at least, once he joined the Squad, and getting less and less friendly to him, repeating “once a criminal, always a criminal” several times.
What I like about Lawson is he’s the first actually properly well-developed main antagonist. He shows up in the first district, a breath of fresh air compared to the previous three main antagonists and even Denise, who shows up a little over halfway through The Conspiracy. And I love that he’s not just evil for the sake of being evil/over the top evil/cartoonishly evil. He actually has nuance besides “god complex.” He genuinely thinks he’s doing right, and it shows. I love villains who genuinely think they’re doing good.
Side note: I have seen many people claim Justin is more evil than/just as evil as Denise, which is actually ridiculous. Lawson is a dictator of a city, but Denise wanted to literally KILL EVERYONE IN GRIMSBOROUGH. Heck, Lawson is less evil—WAY less evil—than Joe Warren! (Using Joe as an example since they’re both mayors.) Joe wanted to rule the WORLD simply because he thought he was superior to everyone else. Lawson ended up ruling a city because he thought—and was correct—that there was corruption everywhere, from law enforcement, gangs, and rich families, and thought someone needed to do something about it, with his methods becoming extreme in the final district of the game. Lawson isn’t comparable to Denise at all beyond them both being the main antagonists of their games! And Lawson would HATE Joe Warren and find him to be a despicable, evil, corrupt man he needs to get rid of! And he’s right, Warren was way more violent than him! Warren is more comparable to Malcolm Rochester’s political actions, if anything!
Lawson’s psychology is fascinating, too, because he’s not a raging psychopath like some other villains. He’s clearly grieving immensely for his murdered fiancée, even turning to drug use/abuse to try to bring himself some relief from the pain her violent murder caused. I’m not a huge fan of creating a female character just to kill her to develop a male character’s story, and Abigail does fall into that category, unfortunately, but her backstory does provide a good motivator for Lawson and his very black and white views of justice. Additionally, I think he might’ve developed some PTSD from getting shot in Tipping the Scales. I’m not justifying any of his actions, but I think in the modern day, if he had been willing to accept he needed help, he could’ve gotten some much-needed therapy, and all of the pain he caused could’ve been avoided. But he left behind a complicated legacy because he killed Charlie, almost killed a bunch of people because they fought against him, repressed freedom of the press, drove people in poverty, was blackmailing Arthur by threatening to murder Bernadine, as well as other crimes, but at the same time, before he was mayor, he had sweeping reforms done to the insane asylum in Grim Chapel and tried to help street kids. There are people out there whose lives he improved, and he did good things, so it would be a tough situation if you benefitted because of him, and yet saw him become a dictator. I don’t think you can fit Lawson into a box very easily. He’s a complex character. He fell from grace, and I love characters like that. And Capital Peak is a great district, filled with tension and unease. You always are afraid Lawson is going to storm on board and arrest you all. And I like the showdown with him. I personally think it would’ve been more fitting if Diego or Maddie had shot Lawson (I think it would’ve been OOC for Arthur to kill him), but it’s still excellent, and I love the Resistance that springs up to fight him. He’s clearly lost his mind by the end of the district, and fighting against dictators in games is fun.
Side note: I find it hilarious that Lawson had his days and plans ruined by two separate teenagers (Giulietta and Archie) once they returned to Concordia.
There’s just one character who beats him out slightly, and that’s….
1. Nebet, Travel in Time
I genuinely think that there might’ve been a different team writing Nebet rather than the rest of the game, because how do you make a boring slog (sorry, I don’t really like s6) for the game, but then strike (not fool’s) gold when writing THIS queen? The only bad things I can say about her are that one, I did see her betrayal coming a mile away, and two, I just wish I had seen more of her.
First of all, a proper teammate betrayal! Love me one of these, especially since we hadn’t had a proper teammate betrayal since s3. It hits the team appropriately hard because, even though we hadn’t known Nebet for that long (only fifteen cases) before Altered Present, the game did a good job with its limited time showing her rapport with the rest of the team. I liked her interactions with Jack and Orlando especially, and have no complaints about her relationship with anyone else besides “I wanted to see more.” I love her character design, she is drop dead gorgeous in all of her outfits. And as a sidenote, I find her relationship with Ammon to be hilarious. He’s her sidekick and a complete tool, and I like to headcanon that he had a crush on her, because that makes his second death even more hilarious.
Even if she hadn’t pulled off a great plot twist at the end of the game, I would still really like her for just being a cool villain. I like the line in Fool’s Gold where Amy says, “We trusted you, Nebet…Nefertiti. And you did this to us!” to which Nebet says, “I did what I had to do for my family. There were some hard choices to make….but I refuse to be judged by you!” Nifty little foreshadowing to her ultimate turn around, considering she later says that she was at her happiest when she was working with the team. And I like her murder motive, brutal as that murder was: she murdered her own father because she was predicting that her parents were going to send her to Egypt to prevent her from using the time machine again, considering only she and Ammon knew that time manipulation was how her family had risen through the centuries. And I love her line of, “I’m the one you should be thanking! You’d be nothing if I hadn’t changed history! NOTHING!” Good villain breakdown.
There’s not much to say about her exile in the fields of the Wolaniu island except that I want to know more! There were traces of her having mixed feelings about betraying the team, or at least having some conflict about it, but on the island is where she REALLY realized how wrong she and her family was. Had epiphanies, so to speak, and knew that her family, Ammon, and her needed to be stopped. And that brings us to the end of the game.
I am delighted that the huge twist was not spoiled for me. I was seriously irritated with the game for making a random woman the killer until I was like, “Wait…Nebet?!” This is really my only main complaint: we didn’t get to see her transformation in depth when she realized on the island how wrong everyone was and that she’d only known happiness with the player and the team, and that she should’ve killed her mother, too, when she had the chance. I’d be skeptical of her motives of realizing how wrong her family was and would’ve thought she just wanted to grab power for herself if she hadn’t been willing to kill HERSELF to really rid the world of the Ptolemys. She realizes that the drive for power had turned her family into “heartless tyrants,” and indeed says in her father’s murder investigation that she was angry that he didn’t seem to love her as much as he used to and said that he didn’t have time for her. And she realizes she was one of those “heartless tyrants.” She calls her younger self selfish and entitled. And she realizes that the best way to save the timeline and prevent the rise of her family is to ultimately kill herself, hoping that the player would forgive her, but also not wanting the player to be disappointed in her for murdering people to save the timeline.
And I love this line, one of her last:
“I have many regrets, but meeting you is not one of them.”
That’s some great stuff right there! Nice villain turnaround because that’s some awesome self-reflection, and she put her money where her mouth is. She offed herself to save the world, going back in time to try to convince her younger self that she was wrong, and opted to kill herself and her accomplice before they could cause any more harm. Honestly, again, biggest complaint is that we don’t see more Nebet, because I’d read an entire novel on her, ngl. Great stuff!
And that about wraps it up! Thank you for voting for this option! We’ve got some excellent characters on this list and a few trashy ones, but ultimately, the list was very fun to make! Thank you for reading to the end, I know it was a lot....
