Yeah, yeah, I know, this is basically the character edition of this list, but I feel that a character's personality deserves to be classified in a different list entirely, as it doesn't really feel like, well, a mechanic. When I think of the word "mechanic," I think of, well, a machine, a device, an aspect of a system that doesn't carry emotional baggage. Characters do. It's what makes them characters, after all. Some, however, carry certain types of emotional and personal baggage and traits that I pretty much consider contraband. Characters with whiny, bratty voices and dialogues. Characters who are lazy and contribute so little to their cause that they might as well not even be there. Characters whose ideas of "comic relief" are horribly skewed. These and other qualities are what offset the following characters into the group of Irritating, Aggravating, and Obnoxious Characters in Otherwise Good Games... in my opinion. (note that this is also another list that I - ah, screw it, you know what I mean)
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(Games: Borderlands 1 and 2) I cannot withhold my absolute loathing of this cancerous little sack of bolts any further. If anything this guy is the utter reason this list exists in the first place. I hate, HATE, HAAAAAAATE Claptrap, with the deepest resentment in my soul. He is everything, and I repeat, EVERYTHING that can and will go wrong with a character in a video game. But enough expunging my hatred, let's make a checklist of all of the faults this character has, shall we? *ahem* Let's see... Shrill, prepubescent voice? Check. Consistently speaks random bullshit sentences? Check. Contributes hardly anything to the plot? Oh, double check. Eventually resorts to juvenile humor? Yep. And, to put the cherry on top, he makes terrible dubstep noises and constantly dances around like a baboon. Well, congratulations, Gearbox! You have successfully designed one of the most obnoxious contraptions that fiction can comprehend! Now do us a favor: Kill him, HANG HIM BY HIS CIRCUIT WIRES, and don't you even fucking DARE think about bringing him back for the sequel. I don't care that everyone started to hate him in-universe in Borderlands 2, the truth is that I hate him more. Times infinity. Squared.
(Games: Super Mario Brothers, Mario Sports Series, countless other Mario titles) Princess Peach wasn't always bad. I mean, sure, her personality matched that of a lifeless Barbie doll, and I guess after a while I'm sure a lot of people began to question why her safety measures are so awful after she got kidnapped for, like, the fifth time, but we didn't care because she hardly ever spoke any words at all, and when she did, she was relatively calm about it... then came Mario Galaxy, which ruined all the fun and destroyed every last ounce of likability I tried to contain for Peach by giving her a voice I simply cannot stand. Before, Princess Peach at least sounded somewhat regal and dignified, but now when she speaks, you can practically DIE from how saccharine her voice sounds. Whenever she yelled out Mario's name in the past, at least she was subtle about it, but now it's this screechy-sounding "MAAAAAAAAAAAHREEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOO" that kills nearly all of the blood flow to my brain every time I hear it. Other than that, my complaints aren't too exaggerated, even if she is just a tool to advance the plot (I can forgive that because Mario isn't a seriously story-driven game), but dammit, Nintendo, tone down the volume and energy in her voice back to the Sunshine days, please.
(Games: Debuted in Super Mario Sunshine, appears in countless Mario games) Bowser Jr. is ALMOST the Mario equivalent of Anakin Skywalker from Star Wars Episode 1. His first appearance was in the GameCube title Super Mario Sunshine, and after having dealt with him for so long, I have quite a few gripes with him. First is that he sounds like he has a constant allergy, what with his nasally voice. Second is his actual allergy towards anything cool. Sure, he apparently had decent parkour skills in Sunshine, but by the time New Super Mario Bros. hit he seemed to have forgotten about all of those aerobatic skills and just shuffles around left and right across the floor trying to run into you. Even Boom-Boom, the miniboss from Super Mario Bros. 3, gives a better effort than he does. My last complaint is that he is (or, rather, was) supposed to be a stand-in for Bowser's other Koopaling cronies, but then they found out the hard way (via the hostile fanbase) that hardly anyone liked him as a character, so the classic Koopa gang was thrown back in, and now Bowser Jr. is just... there. He's annoying, he's hardly any more challenging to beat than the entire Koopa clan, and he's just a lazy idea in general. I suppose he isn't as egregious as some of the other examples on this list, but to this day I still just shake my head in shame whenever he shows up.
(Games: Pretty much every single Star Fox title) Really, this entry speaks for itself. Slippy might as well be the most detrimental person to add to anyone's team period, as he needs to be rescued so many times from incoming fighters that I'm beginning to wonder if Slippy is in more constant danger than freaking Princess Peach. Oh, and he broke a jukebox in Star Fox Adventures. Case in point: Slippy causes more problems than he solves.
(Games: Debuted in Soul Calibur III, now a mainstay of the series) Tira is what happens when you take the biggest weeaboo on the internet and ask him/her to come up with a character like Helga from Hey Arnold! To clarify, she has a split personality disorder. One of them is a cutesy-yet-ax-crazy persona and the other comes off as gothic and demented. Neither of them are arousing, and both of them come off as cheesy and incredibly gauche ("Ha ha ha ha! Wanna die now?" or "Let's find out... just how dark your blood is..."). Coupled with yet another harrowing, teenager voice and an idiotic get-up (in one of the games, I'm pretty sure she dresses up as a jester. And that is her serious, non-joke outfit.) and you get Tira, the most devilish emo/kawaii dream team to ever haunt fighting games.
(Games: Debuted in Super Mario Land, appears in countless Mario spin-off titles) What else can I say? It's quite literally the red-headed stepchild version of Peach. I guess the only thing I can put as a positive about her is that she has a TAD bit more personality than Peach does since she displays tomboyish qualities, but that often just leads to her being even more annoying than she already needs to be. And she has no correlation to anything in the Mario universe besides being the mail-order damsel-in-distress for Super Mario Land, which I guess gives her more credit than Waluigi, but at least Waluigi is hilarious. Well, again, in my opinion. Whatever, Daisy sucks.
(Games: Debuted in Animal Crossing, is a main character in the series) Sure, people complain about how Mr. Resetti bugs the everlasting bejeezus out of them, but at least he serves as an anti-cheating measure. Tom Nook, on the other hand, is a money-grubbing assflap whose only purpose in the game is to keep mooching off of your bells by selling you furniture, housing, and other tools you need to keep the town tidy. Tom Nook is what would happen if Mr. Krabs used business ethics popularized by Big Bill Hell's, minus the swearing. This walking Ponzi scheme has the absolute gall to stalk you out while browsing houses, and essentially forces you to purchase one with hardly any forewarning. Then you realize you're broke. Hey, that's no problem, though, because Tom Nook will gladly allow you to serve as his bitch for the next 45 minutes as you walk around town accomplishing mundane tasks such as delivering carpets and planting flowers. I think it's alright that Nintendo is helping to teach me how to play Animal Crossing, but why do I have to spend nearly an hour doing this asshole's bidding? The worst part is he doesn't even take off a sizable chunk of your mortgage, he just cuts 4,000 bells from it, which isn't really that much considering your first debt is 19,800. Then, of course, for each time you pay off your house, he slaps ANOTHER mortgage on there in case you want to upgrade to a better house with more space. Screw you, Nookie. That's some bullshit conning right there. He's better at scamming you out of your sweat and dimes than THE GAME'S RESIDENT CON MAN, CRAZY REDD! When people start to like a guy who deals in the BLACK MARKET more than you, you know you have failed as a character.
(Debuted in Sonic Adventure, most recent appearance was in Sonic Generations) Omochao is the tutorial puppet most commonly used in a lot of the current-generation Sonic the Hedgehog games, and he/she/it(?) is commonly referred to as the Navi of the franchise. He pops up every now and then to give you hints in a robotic 10-year-old's voice, except by "every now and then" I mean "every 5 seconds." Some of his advice isn't even that helpful; there's one point in Sonic Adventure 2 where he teaches you how to glide... right after you figure out how to glide, remarking with a "...oh, but you probably already knew about that." You can't escape from him in Sonic Heroes, either, since he's in the main menu constantly talking his head off there, too! This guy is so annoying that the developers put in a way to "kill" him, which rewards you by having him state that he's not going to help you anymore. And no, really, I meant that as a reward, because you'll definitely want to spend a few minutes breathing in without this flying sack of crap babying you through the game. (It gets worse in Sonic Generations, where he/she/it gets an annoyingly girlish voice)
(Game: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion) If I was a celebrity, I wouldn't have too much beef with my fanbase, even if they did consistently beg for an autograph or a photo or something of the sort. I WOULD, however, have a problem with the fans that follow me around and stalk me out like they're a witness protection agency, and for many a gamer, that is exactly how they feel towards this... thing. The Adoring Fan is an NPC that shows up after you become the Grand Champion of the Arena, and by shows up, I mean he shows up nearly INSTANTLY. And come on, just look at this guy! He looks like the love child of Vegeta and Bilbo Baggins! If you manage to avoid the Adoring Fan, he'll track you down like flies do to feces. Once he catches up to you, he asks if he can have the dubious honor of following you around for a while. Sure, you can tell him to stay put, but he'll always show up again at the most inconvenient of times to bug you about it until your wits are driven to their end. Oh, but I know what you're thinking, "Can't I just kill him and rid myself of his reeking presence?" *EEEEEEEEEEH* Sorry, bub. Killing him may get rid of him for now, but he'll always respawn and go straight back to his filthy stalking habits as if nothing had happened at all. You can take this cockhugger to the top of Dive Rock, punt him down a rocky mountain and stab his mangled corpse twenty-seven times and he'll STILL find a way to resurrect himself good as new. Maybe the Elder Gods are so hesitant to let this repugnant pig-face dwell within their domain that they refuse to grant his soul access to the afterlife. What a fitting punishment.
(Game: Prototype 2) If you read my long rant about how cruddy and repetitive Prototype 2's story and cast are, I shouldn't need to say much. For those of you who haven't, let me break it down for you. Prototype 1 was a game where you played as an ex-scientist-turned-viral-monstrosity named Alex Mercer, who has no memory of his past or what happened to start the outbreak. His character wasn't written with persistent details but was bearable enough to follow along with. Some people, however, thought of Alex Mercer's character to be rather anti-heroic, and thus didn't really engage in him as a character all that well. Radical's solution to this immensely minor problem was to forge an entirely new and doubly unlikable protagonist in order to stop Mercer, which resulted in James Heller. 98% of his dialogue comes out as f-bombs, and while I'm usually willing to let other characters get away with obscene amounts of cussing (like that guy from House of the Dead: Overkill), the way James's voice actor says it just doesn't make it sound right in the slightest. His character is stoic and uninteresting, somehow even more so than the character who is literally THE MANIFESTATION OF THE BLACKLIGHT VIRUS. It doesn't help that his back story is incredibly contrived and sounds like something the writers wrote on a napkin at Starbucks in a last-ditch attempt at making us feel "sorry for him." Okay, his wife and child are dead. That's terrible. You know what else is terrible, Radical? CANNIBALISM. BIOMASS-CONSUMPTION. It's one thing that the protagonist is an gruff, thick-head buffoon who consumes the bodies and memories of innocent human beings, but now you're trying to get me emotionally invested in him? No chance. Maybe I would consider it if you had him take some anger management classes or go on a non-fleshy diet.