Cfrock
Keep it strong
I personally wouldn't count Agahnim in this group because he wasn't a puppet working for the main villain, he was just an alter-ego of the main villain. Granted, it's a similar concept and I wouldn't at all be surprised to learn that Agahnim inspired Zant or Ghirahim, but that difference puts him out of my choice immediately. So, looking at Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword, which game di it best comes down to several factors for me. First of, character. Second, narrative. Third, tension. Personally, Twilight Princess wins out in each one of these catagories.
Looking at character, the crucial difference between Zant and Ghirahim is that Zant has an arc. Zant is different at the end Twilight Princess compared to how he is at the start. When we first learn of him, he is introduced as powerful and imposing. He instantly appears to be a true villain with the power of darkness at his command. We see him killing Hylian soldiers and forcing Zelda to surrender her kingdom. We see him plunge Hyrule into perpetual Twilight and fill it with monsters. Even the camera angles used in cut-scenes featuring Zant are used to make him feel other-worldly and unnatural. A tone is established and he manages to feel like a real threat. Like many villains he is arrogant and egotistical, but his actions are in line with this characteristic because we see that he has basically conquered Hyrule and so can afford to be smug about his powers. His defeat of the Light Spirits and attempt to kill Midna give us clear motive to want him defeated and are used to spur us on and helps drive the narrative. Zant talks about a "God" who granted him his powers, introducing us to the notion that there is another villain behind him. But it goes a little deeper than that. The story isn't a clear cut 'Evil God gave Zant power, Zant went and caused chaos'. Zant has a backstory that makes his involvement in the plot much clearer and more justified. His growing frustrations with how the Royal Family that he served had, as he described it, "resigned itself to this miserable half-existence" between light and dark gave rise to his belief that he should rule the Twili because he could restore them to what he felt was their rightful place. When he found Ganondorf and received his powers, he could make this goal a reality. That is another major plus for Zant over Ghirahim in my view; Zant may be a puppet to Ganondrof but he has his own goal, his own objective and his own motivations. Zant wants the Twili to dominate the world of light as revenge for his people's original banishment. When Ganondorf enters the plot fully, he is taking what Zant had worked to acheive and subverting it to his own whims. This is another distinction between Zant and Ghirahim; Zant is used by Ganondorf and is betrayed (the scene with Zant's neck snapping as Ganondrof dies can be argued to be symbolic of Zant's desire to see his betrayer fail), whereas Ghirahim was simply created to do what Demise wished and nothing more. There's a lot going on under the surface with Zant and his eventual break-down is a brilliant moment, in my honest opinion. We see, extremely clearly, just how Link's repeated resistance has affected him. We have driven the villain to insanity with our defiance and now he is lashing out at us in any way he can. This is the culmination of his arc, as Zant is no longer the calm and ominous figure we were first introduced to, but instead has been reduced to a mess of choatic fury. It shows a change and development, and it gives our actions as players more meaning because we are the ones who have done this to him.
Ghirahim, on the other hand, is missing many of those key components. He has no arc, he has no personal motives and he isn't betrayed. There is very little story to Ghirahim and that instantly makes him a much weaker character, in my opinion. When we first meet Ghirahim he is arrogant, insulting and he treats Link as no threat, even stating that he will go easy on him and let him live, albeit, heavily beaten. He speaks about needing to capture Zelda so that he may revive his master and from that point on we know that all of Ghirahim's actions are made in an effort to revive this master, identifying him as a sub-villain as soon as we meet him. He then gets defeated by Link (understandable since he was appearntly going easy on him) and promises to kill him when they next meet. Ghirahim is encountered at the end of the Earth Temple and just after the Lanayru Mines and both times he acts arrogantly, insults Link and treats him as no real threat. His manner is flamboyant but that is not character and it certainly isn't engaging because he never does anything differently and he never follows through on his threats. When we meet him in the Ancient Cistern he may as well not have been there at all because he does exactly the same things he did in the Earth Temple, which is to say nothing. Our next major encounter is at the Fire Sanctuary where he fights Link again. By this point he is still arrogant (despite being constantly thwarted), still insulting (despite never following through on threats) and still treats Link as no threat (despite Link constantly proving his worth as an opponent). He has reneged on his promise to kill Link three times and is defeated once more by Link when they fight for a second time. And yet he still acts as if his superiority over Link is a natural constant. I understand that egotism and arrogance are his characteristics but there's a total lack of any sort of development and as a direct result he is simply not engaging or interesting. No matter how often he waggles his tongue or suddenly starts shouting, with no development of his charater there is no reason to care about or pay attention to him. We eventually learn that his master is a demon called Demise, an entity we have already defeated multiple times by the point at which we learn its name, and Ghirahim is basically absent until the very end, when he finally kidnaps Zelda. This was his entire goal throughout the entire game, and he acheives it not through ingenuity or force, but by hiding behind a pillar and popping out all of a sudden. It demeans him, as all of his power and supposed initiative was ultimately not used to acheive his goal. When Link prepares to battle him for the final time, Ghirahim still behaves arrogantly, still insults Link and still considers him no threat. Right up to the moment Demise is revived, Ghirahim remains exactly the same as he was when we first ever met him. Then Demise pulls a sword from him while he laughs with glee at his master's resurrection and is then absorbed into the blade, fulfilling his final purpose. There's no element of betrayal since Ghirahim knew that he would become a blade once Demise returned. He is actually pleased about it. Ghirahim is less of a puppet than Zant because he actually isn't being used. He existed entirely to return Demise's power. There is no story to him, no character and no development. He is nothing but an object, a tool of Demise, not a puppet.
In terms of narrative, Twilight Princess wins out for me too. As stated above, Zant has a character and a story. He develops and is connected to the events taking place within the world. The idea of a sub-villain is planted much later in the story but this allows for Zant to be a major threat for the majority, and rightly so. Learning that our apparent villain is not the main villain too early weakens the sub-villain's stature and diminishes their threat. It works well in Twilight Princess because the main villain is Ganondorf, a character we already know a lot about from Ocarina of Time. I understand that Ganondorf's supposed sudden appearance in the story is a negative point from many players but there is nothing to be gained from introducing him earlier. Introducing him earlier would weaken Zant as a character and also waste time establishing Ganondorf's character because we are already aware of it from Ocarina of Time. He's an evil, manipulative sorceror who sees personal power above all else. Got it. There's no need to spend unneccesary time explaining that because we already know it. The betrayal angle, which is what truly makes Zant a puppet, adds depth to the villain dynamic as it paints Ganondorf as a true villain and adds an element of tragedy to Zant because he was deceived and saw his desires swept aside. There's a lot to engage with and we learn more about the kind of man Ganondorf is by seeing him use a puppet instead of gettign directly involved like he did in Ocarina of Time.
Skyward Sword lacks this level of engagement. One of the first things we learn about Ghirahim is that he has a master, so right away a lot of his threat is diminished because we know a more powerful villain will eventually show up and take his place. His lack of development combined with the fact that he doesn't actually do anything in the story except chase Zelda very ineffectively leads to a story in which the villain may as well not be present. He gives us no reason to stand against him and, indeed, Link spends the entire game trying to find Zelda and not even considering Ghirahim a priority of any kind. If Link doesn't think it's important to get rid of him then why should we? Another major point against Skyward Sword for me was the fact that repetition of the bosses hurt the narrative. We defeat Ghirahim and his monsters several times without him ever considering Link to be a worthy opponent. Zant's snap to insanity was a result of Link's opposition, but Ghirahim just basically ignores it all right the way through. We never see our actions impact on Ghirahim as a character so we can't effectively engage with him as a villain because it's like he's not even there. By the time Demise appears we have defeated him three times already. While he was in a different form during those fights it was still him as an entity and it makes him a very disappointing figure at the very end. Why should we feel threatened by a demon that we've already defeated numerous times before in gradually more powerful forms? A big mistake Skyward Sword made was not showing us what the world looked like immediately after Demise had been sealed. While it's true we travelled back to that period fo time, the one small area we could enter looked exactly the same as it did in Link's present. We never saw what Demise or his army of demons had done to the world that was apparently so devastating a Goddess sent the human population to live in the sky for thousands of years to escape it. While Zant is plunging the world into Twilight and conquering a nation and Ganondorf is killing Sages and possessing the Princess, Ghirahim is failing to capture a sixteen year old girl and Demise is busy getting defeated everytime he stand up. The Zant/Ganondorf dynamic has a story behind it, it has characters behind it and it has development. The Ghirahim/Demise dynamic has nothing because neither of them actually do anything and never develop as characters and their threat is eliminated almost as soon as they first appear.
Tension more or less encompasses many of the points I have already made. In Twilight Princess Zant is given an air of power by the fact that we see him perform his villainy and we see the effects it has on the world of light. Indeed, even Link is victim to those effects at times. We see him try to murder Midna in an unneccesarily cruel manner, which is a part of character development. He probably could have just hit her with some kind of energy attack but he wanted her to suffer. His method of execution informs us of his character, it shows us that he is cruel and without mercy, and those traits help add tension because we are made painfully aware that our villain is ruthless. Ganondorf in turn is demonstrated to be incredibly powerful, even managing to survive an execution. His betrayal of Zant shows that he is concerned only with his own desires and views all others as pawns on his game board, a characteristic which appears again when we uses the Princess herself to try and kill Link. Twilight Princess builds and develops its villains to make them a real threat and give us a real motivation to stop them. This is where the tension and drama of the story comes from.
Skyward Sword does almost nothing to achieve tension or drama. Ghirahim has no development and never engages in the story in a meaningful or even significant way. He is defeated multiple times throughout the adventure which makes him seem weak and in the end he relies not on his powers or abilities but on a simplistic, almost childish, trick of hiding just out of view before running forward and snatching Zelda. He doesn't do anything and we never see that he has any impact on events or the world around us so why care about him at all? He may as well have not been there because it didn't make a difference when he was. Demise is handled even more poorly. His general presence is introduced incredibly early (which makes Ghirahim even less of a threat, as stated above) and he is, in one form, defeated multiple times as well, ven before he gets an actual name. We never get to see him do anything excpet walk up a hill and have a sword fight with Link and we never get to see what he did to the world before his imprisonmnet. Nothing is done to build up a present threat for Demise. We are simply told that he is evil and that he tried to destory the world of Hylia. That's it. If we don't see the villains do something or we don't see the results of their villainy we have no reason to care about them or why we need to stop them. Going off Skyward Sword, all Ghirahim was guilty of was chasing a young girl and all Demise was guilty of was causing Impa to worry about the temple ruins. They didn't do anything so there was no reason to care about either of them.
At the end of it, I look at Twilight Princess and see a game which understands the basics of story-telling. It shows us why our villains need to be stopped. It shows us why our villains do what they do. It has the villains put our hero through trials and present obstacles to him. It is also the only one of the three poll options in which there truly is a puppet. Skyward Sword never gives us any reason to fear or even just care about our villains. We don't see them do bad things. We don't see people suffer because of them. We defeat them numerous times throughout the course of the adventure and they never develop as characters or as plot elements. There's no engagement with them and their only reason for doing what they do is because they are evil demons and that's the full scope of 'depth' they have attributed to them.
Twilight Princess executed it better.
Looking at character, the crucial difference between Zant and Ghirahim is that Zant has an arc. Zant is different at the end Twilight Princess compared to how he is at the start. When we first learn of him, he is introduced as powerful and imposing. He instantly appears to be a true villain with the power of darkness at his command. We see him killing Hylian soldiers and forcing Zelda to surrender her kingdom. We see him plunge Hyrule into perpetual Twilight and fill it with monsters. Even the camera angles used in cut-scenes featuring Zant are used to make him feel other-worldly and unnatural. A tone is established and he manages to feel like a real threat. Like many villains he is arrogant and egotistical, but his actions are in line with this characteristic because we see that he has basically conquered Hyrule and so can afford to be smug about his powers. His defeat of the Light Spirits and attempt to kill Midna give us clear motive to want him defeated and are used to spur us on and helps drive the narrative. Zant talks about a "God" who granted him his powers, introducing us to the notion that there is another villain behind him. But it goes a little deeper than that. The story isn't a clear cut 'Evil God gave Zant power, Zant went and caused chaos'. Zant has a backstory that makes his involvement in the plot much clearer and more justified. His growing frustrations with how the Royal Family that he served had, as he described it, "resigned itself to this miserable half-existence" between light and dark gave rise to his belief that he should rule the Twili because he could restore them to what he felt was their rightful place. When he found Ganondorf and received his powers, he could make this goal a reality. That is another major plus for Zant over Ghirahim in my view; Zant may be a puppet to Ganondrof but he has his own goal, his own objective and his own motivations. Zant wants the Twili to dominate the world of light as revenge for his people's original banishment. When Ganondorf enters the plot fully, he is taking what Zant had worked to acheive and subverting it to his own whims. This is another distinction between Zant and Ghirahim; Zant is used by Ganondorf and is betrayed (the scene with Zant's neck snapping as Ganondrof dies can be argued to be symbolic of Zant's desire to see his betrayer fail), whereas Ghirahim was simply created to do what Demise wished and nothing more. There's a lot going on under the surface with Zant and his eventual break-down is a brilliant moment, in my honest opinion. We see, extremely clearly, just how Link's repeated resistance has affected him. We have driven the villain to insanity with our defiance and now he is lashing out at us in any way he can. This is the culmination of his arc, as Zant is no longer the calm and ominous figure we were first introduced to, but instead has been reduced to a mess of choatic fury. It shows a change and development, and it gives our actions as players more meaning because we are the ones who have done this to him.
Ghirahim, on the other hand, is missing many of those key components. He has no arc, he has no personal motives and he isn't betrayed. There is very little story to Ghirahim and that instantly makes him a much weaker character, in my opinion. When we first meet Ghirahim he is arrogant, insulting and he treats Link as no threat, even stating that he will go easy on him and let him live, albeit, heavily beaten. He speaks about needing to capture Zelda so that he may revive his master and from that point on we know that all of Ghirahim's actions are made in an effort to revive this master, identifying him as a sub-villain as soon as we meet him. He then gets defeated by Link (understandable since he was appearntly going easy on him) and promises to kill him when they next meet. Ghirahim is encountered at the end of the Earth Temple and just after the Lanayru Mines and both times he acts arrogantly, insults Link and treats him as no real threat. His manner is flamboyant but that is not character and it certainly isn't engaging because he never does anything differently and he never follows through on his threats. When we meet him in the Ancient Cistern he may as well not have been there at all because he does exactly the same things he did in the Earth Temple, which is to say nothing. Our next major encounter is at the Fire Sanctuary where he fights Link again. By this point he is still arrogant (despite being constantly thwarted), still insulting (despite never following through on threats) and still treats Link as no threat (despite Link constantly proving his worth as an opponent). He has reneged on his promise to kill Link three times and is defeated once more by Link when they fight for a second time. And yet he still acts as if his superiority over Link is a natural constant. I understand that egotism and arrogance are his characteristics but there's a total lack of any sort of development and as a direct result he is simply not engaging or interesting. No matter how often he waggles his tongue or suddenly starts shouting, with no development of his charater there is no reason to care about or pay attention to him. We eventually learn that his master is a demon called Demise, an entity we have already defeated multiple times by the point at which we learn its name, and Ghirahim is basically absent until the very end, when he finally kidnaps Zelda. This was his entire goal throughout the entire game, and he acheives it not through ingenuity or force, but by hiding behind a pillar and popping out all of a sudden. It demeans him, as all of his power and supposed initiative was ultimately not used to acheive his goal. When Link prepares to battle him for the final time, Ghirahim still behaves arrogantly, still insults Link and still considers him no threat. Right up to the moment Demise is revived, Ghirahim remains exactly the same as he was when we first ever met him. Then Demise pulls a sword from him while he laughs with glee at his master's resurrection and is then absorbed into the blade, fulfilling his final purpose. There's no element of betrayal since Ghirahim knew that he would become a blade once Demise returned. He is actually pleased about it. Ghirahim is less of a puppet than Zant because he actually isn't being used. He existed entirely to return Demise's power. There is no story to him, no character and no development. He is nothing but an object, a tool of Demise, not a puppet.
In terms of narrative, Twilight Princess wins out for me too. As stated above, Zant has a character and a story. He develops and is connected to the events taking place within the world. The idea of a sub-villain is planted much later in the story but this allows for Zant to be a major threat for the majority, and rightly so. Learning that our apparent villain is not the main villain too early weakens the sub-villain's stature and diminishes their threat. It works well in Twilight Princess because the main villain is Ganondorf, a character we already know a lot about from Ocarina of Time. I understand that Ganondorf's supposed sudden appearance in the story is a negative point from many players but there is nothing to be gained from introducing him earlier. Introducing him earlier would weaken Zant as a character and also waste time establishing Ganondorf's character because we are already aware of it from Ocarina of Time. He's an evil, manipulative sorceror who sees personal power above all else. Got it. There's no need to spend unneccesary time explaining that because we already know it. The betrayal angle, which is what truly makes Zant a puppet, adds depth to the villain dynamic as it paints Ganondorf as a true villain and adds an element of tragedy to Zant because he was deceived and saw his desires swept aside. There's a lot to engage with and we learn more about the kind of man Ganondorf is by seeing him use a puppet instead of gettign directly involved like he did in Ocarina of Time.
Skyward Sword lacks this level of engagement. One of the first things we learn about Ghirahim is that he has a master, so right away a lot of his threat is diminished because we know a more powerful villain will eventually show up and take his place. His lack of development combined with the fact that he doesn't actually do anything in the story except chase Zelda very ineffectively leads to a story in which the villain may as well not be present. He gives us no reason to stand against him and, indeed, Link spends the entire game trying to find Zelda and not even considering Ghirahim a priority of any kind. If Link doesn't think it's important to get rid of him then why should we? Another major point against Skyward Sword for me was the fact that repetition of the bosses hurt the narrative. We defeat Ghirahim and his monsters several times without him ever considering Link to be a worthy opponent. Zant's snap to insanity was a result of Link's opposition, but Ghirahim just basically ignores it all right the way through. We never see our actions impact on Ghirahim as a character so we can't effectively engage with him as a villain because it's like he's not even there. By the time Demise appears we have defeated him three times already. While he was in a different form during those fights it was still him as an entity and it makes him a very disappointing figure at the very end. Why should we feel threatened by a demon that we've already defeated numerous times before in gradually more powerful forms? A big mistake Skyward Sword made was not showing us what the world looked like immediately after Demise had been sealed. While it's true we travelled back to that period fo time, the one small area we could enter looked exactly the same as it did in Link's present. We never saw what Demise or his army of demons had done to the world that was apparently so devastating a Goddess sent the human population to live in the sky for thousands of years to escape it. While Zant is plunging the world into Twilight and conquering a nation and Ganondorf is killing Sages and possessing the Princess, Ghirahim is failing to capture a sixteen year old girl and Demise is busy getting defeated everytime he stand up. The Zant/Ganondorf dynamic has a story behind it, it has characters behind it and it has development. The Ghirahim/Demise dynamic has nothing because neither of them actually do anything and never develop as characters and their threat is eliminated almost as soon as they first appear.
Tension more or less encompasses many of the points I have already made. In Twilight Princess Zant is given an air of power by the fact that we see him perform his villainy and we see the effects it has on the world of light. Indeed, even Link is victim to those effects at times. We see him try to murder Midna in an unneccesarily cruel manner, which is a part of character development. He probably could have just hit her with some kind of energy attack but he wanted her to suffer. His method of execution informs us of his character, it shows us that he is cruel and without mercy, and those traits help add tension because we are made painfully aware that our villain is ruthless. Ganondorf in turn is demonstrated to be incredibly powerful, even managing to survive an execution. His betrayal of Zant shows that he is concerned only with his own desires and views all others as pawns on his game board, a characteristic which appears again when we uses the Princess herself to try and kill Link. Twilight Princess builds and develops its villains to make them a real threat and give us a real motivation to stop them. This is where the tension and drama of the story comes from.
Skyward Sword does almost nothing to achieve tension or drama. Ghirahim has no development and never engages in the story in a meaningful or even significant way. He is defeated multiple times throughout the adventure which makes him seem weak and in the end he relies not on his powers or abilities but on a simplistic, almost childish, trick of hiding just out of view before running forward and snatching Zelda. He doesn't do anything and we never see that he has any impact on events or the world around us so why care about him at all? He may as well have not been there because it didn't make a difference when he was. Demise is handled even more poorly. His general presence is introduced incredibly early (which makes Ghirahim even less of a threat, as stated above) and he is, in one form, defeated multiple times as well, ven before he gets an actual name. We never get to see him do anything excpet walk up a hill and have a sword fight with Link and we never get to see what he did to the world before his imprisonmnet. Nothing is done to build up a present threat for Demise. We are simply told that he is evil and that he tried to destory the world of Hylia. That's it. If we don't see the villains do something or we don't see the results of their villainy we have no reason to care about them or why we need to stop them. Going off Skyward Sword, all Ghirahim was guilty of was chasing a young girl and all Demise was guilty of was causing Impa to worry about the temple ruins. They didn't do anything so there was no reason to care about either of them.
At the end of it, I look at Twilight Princess and see a game which understands the basics of story-telling. It shows us why our villains need to be stopped. It shows us why our villains do what they do. It has the villains put our hero through trials and present obstacles to him. It is also the only one of the three poll options in which there truly is a puppet. Skyward Sword never gives us any reason to fear or even just care about our villains. We don't see them do bad things. We don't see people suffer because of them. We defeat them numerous times throughout the course of the adventure and they never develop as characters or as plot elements. There's no engagement with them and their only reason for doing what they do is because they are evil demons and that's the full scope of 'depth' they have attributed to them.
Twilight Princess executed it better.
Hah, potato...that's hysterical. His new nickname is Evil Tater.
