Gaming is a personal experience. What one person sees as a vast world waiting to be explored, another sees as a lifeless plain with things way too far apart, but there is one thing that all gamers can agree on, stupid annoying characters.

Almost every game and every franchise has at least one character that makes you want to gouge out your own eyes or rip out the HDD of your console and burn it, below you will find a selection of these characters that really grind our gears!

(It goes without saying that there are some spoilers below – you have been warned!)

5: Sheva Alomar:  Resident Evil 5

This was a tough call between Sheva from RE5 & Ashley from RE4, both are horrendously annoying in their own special ways but in the end Sheva won out. See, with Ashley, she was your typical damsel in distress, useless to the point of idiotic; all she could do was scream LEOOOOOOON and get carried away by cultists. Capcom paid attention to players and the feelings they had towards Ashley and promised us something different, they promised us that in the next game we would have a female companion that would kick some serious ass, instead what we got was Sheva.

Sheva was promoted as a highly trained, highly skilled agent with the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance; she had to have been quite good otherwise she wouldn’t have been assigned to Chris Redfield…..right….RIGHT?? WRONG! Sheva spends most of the game acting like an entrée at a Manjini cocktail party. When she isn’t screaming for your help while being chewed on by the inhabitants of a small African village, she is busy wasting all your ammo and using all your herbs and sprays on a paper cut or grazed knees.

4: Any ‘friends’ from the Sonic Series

I wrote an article a while ago about Sonic the Hedgehog and where the series had gone wrong, you can find the article HERE, but one of the points was the frankly baffling roster of ‘friends’ that Sega have inflicted on the Blue Blur.

Miles ‘Tails’ Prower, Amy Rose, Knuckles The Echidna, Nack The Weasel, Charmy Bee, Espio The Chameleon, Mighty The Armadillo, Vector The Crocodile, Big The Cat, Froggy, Omochao, Rouge The Bat, Cream The Rabbit, Blaze The Cat, Jet The Hawk, Wave The Swallow and Storm The Albatross.

I rest my case.

3: Rinoa Final Fantasy VIII /Vanille Final Fantasy XIII

I’m not an expert on Final Fantasy games but I’ve played enough of them to know that they are filled to the brim with characters you just want to slap. So with this I consulted my good friend, fellow writer and Final Fantasy aficionado, Gareth Edwards. After much deliberation (less than a second) he gave me names of Rinoa from Final Fantasy VIII and Vanille from Final Fantasy XIII, but I’ll let him explain why he dislikes them so much:

“Rinoa appears in Final Fantasy VIII and makes a stunning appearance in the ballroom dancing cut scene. Unfortunately, for the rest of the game, she is annoying, whiny, and you are forced to save her from becoming the next “sorceress” puppet set to destroy the world. She fights with a Frisbee, and her limit breaks are based around dog tricks for her beloved “Angelo”. At one point you have to rescue her from floating in space, and I have lost count of how many times I left her to float away, just to get some satisfaction from the situation

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Vanille, from Final Fantasy XIII, was an overly sexualised teenage girl, with an irreverent cheerfulness despite the dire situation facing the characters from the game. Her final sacrifice at the end of the game was an attempt to justify her as a necessary inclusion, but was ultimately pointless due to the fact that Fang had volunteered to sacrifice herself for the Ragnarok. Her brief reappearance in Final Fantasy XIII-2 only reaffirmed the fact that her existence was never really required.”

2: Navi: Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Loving something is about seeing it for what it is and accepting that and its faults. I love the Legend of Zelda franchise, it has been a corner stone of my gaming life since I can remember so I like to think I am well placed to provide critique to Nintendo regarding the ‘companions’ they create.

Companions have been a part of the Zelda franchise since Ocarina of Time was released. Nintendo prides itself that the game is often rated as the best videogame of all time practically every time someone does one of those polls, what they don’t seem to champion so much is the fact that the game manages to receive those accolades in spite of the fact it contains one of the most annoying companions to have ever been invented.

Ask any gamer about Navi and usually the first thing they will say is ‘Hey!’or ‘Hey! Listen’. Both sayings ran from Navi’s mouth like water down the Niagara Falls, the flying ball of fluff appeared to be physically unable to shut her trap to prevent some of the most obvious and inane comments from spewing forth, but in spite of it all Navi is still of use as without her you wouldn’t be able to Z Target. It is this one redeeming feature that prevents her from securing the top spot on this list.

1: Trip: Enslaved Odyssey to the West.

The characters I have mentioned so far have one thing in common; they are not responsible for the situation the main protagonist finds themselves in. They are not the reason the game takes place, they are merely playing a secondary support role to assist our character in their quest.

Trip does not fall into this category. She is the reason the game takes place, shortly after escaping from a slavers ship she places a control device on our hero and forces him to help her get back home, if he doesn’t agree, he dies, simple! What a Bi**h.

Plus she’s whiny and useless. Every five minutes of gameplay it felt like I was having to run around after her, pick her up, help her get to a new area, chuck her across a gap that was too big for her to jump (I tried chucking her elsewhere but the game wouldn’t let me). I would even go as far to say that I actually feel my overall enjoyment of the game was ruined because of her and constantly having to press L1 to see what she was doing or listen to her state the ruddy obvious.  Plus at the end **SPOILER** She pulls out the wires and cables from the Glass Pyramid which destroys the system and brings everyone out of the matrix style life they were living to start living in the ruins of a war zone. I mean what gives her the right!! I wanted to shove that bloody dragonfly so far up her……aaaaaand breathe.

So there we go, a list of five very annoying game characters. As I said at the start most games will have a character in there that makes your blood boil so let us know who they are in the comments box!