The Top 7 Mentally damaged characters we love

2. Kai

From: Heavenly Sword

When Kai was a child, her parents were murdered in front of her eyes by Flying Fox (no, not Gray Fox... we don't think, anyway). Some might take this post-traumatic stress as an excuse to cruise around Miami ritualistically killing murderers, but not Kai — it had a more troubling effect on her. While her body grew, her mind seems to have remained trapped in an innocent state, so she still talks and acts like a child. A child that carries around a gigantic crossbow.

At several points in Heavenly Sword, we were able to play what Kai refers to as "twing twang." Funny, we've always called it "shooting people in the face with a freaking crossbow." That she found a cute, childlike name to assign to murder is somewhat disturbing, though her innocent demeanor has kept her in our minds, years after the game's short campaign ended. She wasn't even the main character; Nariko, who had the personality of a plank of wood, was. Maybe if the mentally damaged Kai had been the protagonist, Ninja Theory would be making sequels to Heavenly Sword and Enslaved instead of emo-fying Dante for the Devil May Cry reboot.

And who lets her put on her own makeup, anyway? She looks like a little girl who broke into her mother's vanity. Or who just wears really huge sunglasses all the time.

1. Wheatley

From: Portal 2

WARNING: Portal 2 plot spoilers ahead, so be warned. You monster.

In the beginning of Portal 2, Wheatley broke Chell out of her prison and led her towards GLaDOS’s lifeless, robotic corpse. He seemed a little… off, but that’s sort of par for the course when it comes to Aperture Science’s creations, so we didn’t really think anything of it. Even when GLaDOS came back to life, and we had to unplug her and plug Wheatley in, we didn’t think that there was anything wrong with Wheatley, just that he was aloof. He had a fun accent! How could he cause any trouble?

Boy, were we wrong.

It turns out that Wheatley was literally created by the world’s best scientists to make bad choices, and to be as cripplingly stupid as technologically possible. He was meant to be a dumb filter on GLaDOS to keep her in check. He’s literally as mentally damaged as can be, intentionally programmed that way by the same people that created a weapon that allows you to travel through solid freaking matter. He's a cancerous lump of inadequacy made specifically to dumb down one of the most technologically advanced machines in the world. He's mental damage incarnate.

And yet, even when he's going out of his way to kill us, we can't help but feel for him. He's never really evil, especially not when compared to GLaDOS, he's just... well, he's just dumb. Adorably, painfully dumb.

Oct 10, 2011

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