Truly great villains are all too rare, especially in video games but in general too.

Great villains:
- Are competent, otherwise they don't seem threatening. They have to succeed in their plans at least once, and not in a minor way. Being intelligent is a major plus here, as nothing is scarier than a villain that has the potential to not fall into the classic villain traps.
- Are active. They do stuff themselves, instead of relying on minions.Should encounter them more than once or twice in the game. This alone disqualifies most video game villains right there.
- Have some relation to a main character- not relatives, that is too obvious, but they need to be directly related to the main character somehow, even if it's just a thematic level. If we don't have reason to care about the villain because they're just some guy out there being evil, the villain falls flat.

There's other elements, such as being able to give out excellent villainous speeches, but those three are the ones that video games have most trouble with. That's not a bad thing, not all games need strong villains. Especially not games with strong gameplay elements.

Off the top of my head, Handsome Jack was excellent- he fails #2 but it's a significant part of his behavior that he's a coward who leads from behind, as opposed to just being an excuse, and he makes up for it by constantly taunting the party the entire game, and even hitting them where it hurts a few times. Kefka is also great- his big moments are things he personally does himself, and he succeeds at them with flying colors. Luca Blight is probably my favorite villain ever, and spends most of the early portion of the game personally making the main character's lives hell, (even if he himself barely notices them!). I really need to play more BG2, as Irenicus didn't seem like that great of a villain from the small amount of time he was present early on, but I understand he gets better.

Never again shall we meet another antagonist like Jon Irenicus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6LbhhoOSIw

Weekend's practically gone and I'm all Panzer General 2 (~2h), Panzer Corps (the same) and Qvadriga (3h); did some Forza 4 challenges and had some fun with that PSone game Trap Gunner ;P

And oh, best antagonist? Gotta be Lo Wang!

Just finished Grim Dawn. Quite fun and I died even on normal difficulty more than a few times. I'm already itching to try out a new build on a harder difficulty.

Favorite Antagonist: The only one I can think of recently was Michael Mando's excellent performance as Vaas in Far Cry 3.

Best Antagonist is and likely always shall be Kefka Palazzo. No other villain, Final Fantasy or otherwise comes close to having the purity of evil that Kefka has. He desires to destroy the world not so much for personal power, though that certainly is a major factor, but because he can. He doesn't just start out as an all powerful God creature; you get to see his parallel growth in power alongside your party in each encounter with him. Each time he has access to skills that are strong for the time, but not that powerful in the grand scheme, and always a tier ahead of what you have access to, so you get to see some genuine character development with him, and not just a pedestal type destined battle with fate where you only encounter the big bad at the very end. He is there throughout the game and you get to witness his casual cruelty first hand.

And he does have a delightful cackle.

Well, this WE I didn’t play any pc games. I did a full maintenance on my pc (dust cleaning the component and full defrag on all HDD).

I replayed on the PSV game “The Legend of Heroes – Trails of Cold Steel” and watched some tvshow with my tablet.

Best antagonist, hum difficult choice...
GLaDOS (Portal)
Alma Wade (Fear Series)
Eve (Parasite Eve)
Illusive Man (Mass Effect)
Frank Fontaine (Bioshock)
Zachary Hale Comstock (Bioshock Infinity)
SHODAN (System Shock Series)