The figure of the father in video games is not always positive, as unfortunately happens in reality. Among unscrupulous kings, psychopathic scientists and sadistic fighters, video games have sometimes given us characters different from the classic loving parent ready to do anything to protect or save his child. Whether it is genetic, adoptive or blood, we have selected the five worst fathers of video games, chosen as always according to our tastes and without the presumption of drawing up, through them, a perfect or definitive ranking.
ATTENTION: l he article contains some spoilers on the characters and on the video games that have seen them as protagonists.
William Birkin (Resident Evil 2)
William Birkin is one of the brightest and most ambitious minds in the service of the Umbrella Corporation, which together with Albert Wesker creates among other things the T-002 . But also a deranged one: his desire to implant an embryo of the lethal G-Virus in a compatible organism is not explained otherwise, in this case in the body of his little daughter Sherry. Okay, maybe in Resident Evil 2, William is not totally into himself as he mutated into a scary creature after getting self-infected to take revenge on his attackers, i.e. members of an Umbrella military commando, but to us he always seemed lucid. , in that state of transformation, to realize what he was doing. Among other things, he does more damage than the plague by unintentionally infecting Raccoon City which is transformed into a real Hell on Earth.
Jecht (Final Fantasy X)
Jecht is the father of Tidus, the protagonist of Final Fantasy X. Former legend of Blitzball, the most loved sport in Zanarkand and hero of Speyer, he is the classic hard, arrogant and presumptuous father, too full of himself to understand the needs of a son or to be able to express a minimum of feeling towards him. For years he literally mistreats little Tidus calling him weak and crybaby, and telling him that he would never be able to become a good Blitzball player like him. These constant harassing attitudes obviously end up psychologically traumatizing the child for many years, making him morally vulnerable and insecure. In reality Jecht seems to care about Tidus, only for reasons of character he thinks that the only way to stimulate the latter to become better than him and not to commit his own mistakes is to "attack" him, showing himself hard and bad.
Kunikazu Okumura (Persona 5)
There are individuals willing to do anything to achieve something, even to manipulate loved ones or subdue others, just as Kunikazu Okumura's character does in Persona 5. Okumura is an unscrupulous businessman who from an early age cultivates the ambition of wanting to become rich and powerful, and for this reason he is ready to do anything to emerge, even to use his employees as many unwilling slaves, to be subjected to his will with blackmail, grueling work shifts and anything else he may need to achieve his goals. Not least, he has no qualms about exploiting his daughter Haru for his purposes, heedless of her own good and his feelings. On the other hand, for Mr. Okumura it is an inalienable right for every parent to direct the life of their children, if this serves the common good of the family. And patience if the girl is literally squeezed between the expectations of her father and those of society, suffering so much to the point of not knowing how to give the right value to human relationships and to isolate herself, living as a failure every little mistake pointed out by the father-master. br>
Heihachi Mishima (Tekken)
If there is a father who calling "bastard inside" is a compliment, given the level of madness and cruelty that accompanies him, that is Heihachi Mishima from Tekken . A dad so bad that his cycle of physical and psychological abuse is multi-generational. In addition to throwing his son Kazuya first from a cliff to test its potential in view of a possible handover of the family company, the Mishima Zaibatsu, and then into a volcano, at one point he even forces him to make a pact with the Hell, challenging him multiple times in the Tekken tournament. Not happy, he kills his "daughter-in-law", Jun Kazama, carries out experiments on his nephew, Jin, and subjects his adopted son, Lee Chaolan, taken with him with the sole purpose of giving a rival to his son Kazuya, to hard training from an early age. In short, a multi-generational psychopathic torturer.
Henry Lawson (Mass Effect 2)
Miranda Lawson is a crew member of the Normandy in Mass Effect 2. A beautiful and confident girl, but with a secret: she was created from the optimized genetic code of her father, that funny Henry Lawson, eager to generate the perfect creature even at the cost of "playing" with the genetic codes and feelings of others. Apparently affectionate and protective of his daughter, in fact, Henry actually acts only for personal and selfish ends. It is not for nothing that he created other "daughters", such as Oriana, a sister of Miranda. The two, in fact, are not the only ones: confirming that the father has really made the mad scientist, experimenting left and right with his DNA, not caring then to get rid of those creatures that he will have considered as simple "failed experiments". His amorality and lack of fatherly sense emerge further when the events confront him with Shepard and he does not hesitate to use Oriana as a human shield, threatening to kill her, to try to escape from the fight.
