Villain Shoes

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"Never make fun of a man until you've walked two miles in his shoes. Then, you'll be two miles away from him, and you'll have his shoes."

An instance, generally restricted to video games, wherein the player gets to control a main villain, as opposed to the hero. This doesn't apply to spin-off games or multiplayer modes; it only counts if it takes place during the course of the story. This is often done to give the player a Taste of Power, especially if the villain is the Big Bad himself or far more powerful than the player character. If done well, this also establishes that the villain could kill you with his pinky finger without having to see him do it to you.

Doesn't have to involve awesome spiky villain boots, but it helps. Contrast No Campaign for the Wicked. Compare Villain Episode.

Examples of Villain Shoes include:

• The Play Station 3 version of Batman: Arkham Asylum has a bonus level where one can play as The Joker.
• In Lost Odyssey, players get to take a crack at wielding Gongora's magic against his hapless apprentices. (Also a Kick the Dog.)
  • This scene also involves a decision that affects a future Boss Battle. Whichever apprentice you kill last will be Killed Off for Real and won't be present when the party eventually fights them.
• The Force Unleashed - in the very first level, you play as Darth Vader, whom you oppose eventually in the story, before switching to the Apprentice.
  • A bonus level from the 2nd Rogue Squadron game had the player assume the role of Vader during the Death Star attack of the 1st movie.
• Chrono Cross. Entirely justified because you switch bodies with Lynx.
• In Live a Live, the final level, should you choose to play it as Orsted.
• In Star Trek: Armada, the fourth series of missions has you playing as the Borg. The final mission in that series has you assimilating Earth.
• In Final Fantasy VII, you don't control Sephiroth during Cloud's flashbacks, but he is in your party, and it definitely fulfills the role of showing the player that he's ridiculously powerful.
• Breath of Fire 4 has segments where you play as Fou-Lu. At the end of the game you can choose to have The Hero (they're both halves of a dragon god) merge with him, kill all your friends and Take Over the World.
• The second campaign of StarCraft has you playing as the Zerg, the Horde of Alien Locusts who kill and assimilate everything they come across. The Brood War expansion later lets you play as Magnificent Bastard Kerrigan.
• In World of Warcraft, a handful of quests in Icecrown allow you (the player) to take control of Arthas the Lich King in flashback sequences, thanks to a ghost who specifically wants to show the hero how powerful the Lich King is.
• Warcraft 3 has a much more extensive version of this, where a quarter of the gameplay is devoted to massacring countries, raising armies of the undead, and desecrating everything that your main hero once held dear. This hero being, in fact, Arthas as a Death Knight.
• Halo 2 has you play as the Arbiter for quite some time. The Arbiter is an Elite, with a very specific grudge against the Master Chief for destroying one of the halo rings, and for being the whole reason he was in that mess. The two never directly fight, but the thought was definitely there.
• Final Fantasy IV: The After Years puts you in control of Kain's evil side on his quest to destroy Cecil and have Rosa for himself .
  • You also get a chance to play as Golbez in a flashback sequence: you basically take control of Golbez in a recreation of each of the fights with him from the original game.
• Shadow of the Colossus lets you stomp around as the resurrected Dormin for a few moments before inevitably getting sealed in a new can.
• Not really villains, but Part III of Fire Emblem 10 (Radiant Dawn) has the player alternately controlling two forces fighting each other. And for a straight example, the Black Knight is one of the main villains and is controllable in a couple of maps.
• The first historical stage of Eternal Darkness has you playing Pious Augustus, and it's your choice as to which Eldritch Abomination Big Bad he devotes himself to. Unusually, while highly competent in melee combat, Pious is possibly the overall weakest character in the game as he doesn't have any access to the Tome's magic and lacks any ranged weapons. Of course, this takes place before he becomes The Dragon of the game and is just a normal guy with a sword.
  • Yet, he has very high health and stamina, and unlike any other character he has unlimited sanity because he's that dedicated to the mission. He'd be pretty fun to play with in a level that didn't last five minutes.
• Perfect Dark bonus level "Mr. Blonde's Revenge" lets you play an alien poorly disguised as a human.
• Tenchu 2 let you play as Tatsumaru.
• Though not A Taste of Power, as unlocking the mode requires One Hundred Percent Completion, Luc's Chapter in Suikoden III is definitely Villain Shoes.
• Like the FFVII example above, Final Fantasy X allows you to control Seymour several hours before he's revealed to be a villain by anything other than suspiciously unnerving leitmotifs and being a non-hero Bishonen in a Final Fantasy game. It also, like Sephiroth above, establishes Seymour's sheer power quite well and drives the point home by making his partner for that segment, Auron, seem totally useless in comparison.
• The Bowser segments in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. These are particularly awesome segments because they're reconstructed versions of levels from the original Super Mario Bros.. All those enemies and obstacles Mario had to carefully maneuver around all those years ago? Yeah, Bowser just smashes and burns his way through, no big.
  • In the event that you manage to fail those levels, Bowser just gets to try again because, unlike Mario, Bowser has infinite lives.
• One quest in Dragon Fable lets you play as the Ax Crazy pyromancer Xan. Fire ensues.
• In Ultimate Spider-Man for Nintendo DS, the first level is playable with Green Goblin.
  • In the home console versions (and maybe the DS, I don't know), you control Venom, the main villain, for about half of the missions. Despite this shared screentime, he is still clearly the villain, as the player always controls Spider-Man during their fights.
• Siren 2 had a level playable as a Shibito.
• In the Nintendo DS remake of Final Fantasy IV, there was a segment where you play as Golbez in his childhood, although it was only in a town, and with no battles.
• The Nintendo DS version of Crash of the Titans features short sections after each boss where you play as Cortex's niece, Nina.
• In Arc Rise Fantasia, you play as the villain's party consisting of Alf, Clyde, Dynos, and Adele in the Ruins of Ebur. Sadly, this is the one time that you can't strip your guests of their items before they leave you. Well, you can, but you don't get to keep any of the items. They have their own, separate inventory. You do get to play around with some amazing Excel Acts, however.
• Transformers: War for Cybertron has half of the game dedicated to playing as the Decepticons. The second half is played as the Autobots coming Back From the Brink after all the awful stuff you did as a Decepticon.
• In Suikoden III, four of the villains actually count as the 108 Stars of Destiny. Collecting the other 104 before gaining access to the Final Dungeon, followed by beating the final battle, unlocks their leader's POV on the Trinity Sight System, allowing the player to go back and see bits and pieces of the story from their perspective.
• In Valkyria Chronicles, the DLC 'Behind Her Blue Flame' grants you control of Selvaria Bles and an Imperial squad in a side story of three missions, taking place during the early days of the Imperial invasion of Gallia. Two of the missions are actually alternate versions of each other, depending on whether or not you fulfill specific requirements in the first mission. Clearing all three with an A rank or higher unlocks a hidden fourth mission, where you control Selvaria in her Valkyria state.
• In Xenoblade Chronicles, this happens not once but twice with both of Dunban's allies in the Sword Valley battle. Mumkhar was pretty obviously evil and shows up as a willingly mechanized Face, but then Dickson turns out to be the servant of sleeping, malevolent bastard god Zanza. Also two partial examples with Alvis, since he's not really evil but he's definitely working with Zanza initially and arguably even Shulk, before it's revealed that he's been dead fourteen years and a vessel for Zanza the entire time. Seeing as how it all draws heavily from Nietchzean philosophy this is not really surprising at all.
• In the last few issues before its shutdown, City of Heroes began implementing non-combat "epilogue" missions to some story arcs, in which you briefly played a significant NPC—very often a villain—and learned a little more about what happened to them, and why.