Top Ten Video Game Spellcasters

you hello everyone the green scorpion here and it's time to open those spell books and get your wands ready because this is sure to be one of my most controversial lists yet you guys have been clamoring on about a top-10 spellcasters list and candidly I've had some inhibitions about this one magic is a huge part of video games and there are thousands of great characters that I could choose from especially from RPGs magic has been a concept to us since the dawn of humanity a term used for any phenomenon that we cannot explain and in any fantasy media writers are constantly finding new and exciting ways to display magic so today we're here to look at those wizards and witches who throw magical effects into their Chi form of combat in a classical sense spell casters tend to be physically feeble depending not on their strength but their wit's defend out their aggressors a major quality we'll be looking for is intelligence and knowledge of the craft this is still weapons month after all just as a warrior improves with their physical weapon through fierce practice many casters improve through diligent study of the arcane arts or the divine scriptures leading to endless possibilities now this topic is already far too vast so I'm laying some qualifiers right off the bat one no gods otherwise this list will be full of them and that just won't be fun two magical ability can come from natural talent or devoted training but I want to try and draw the fine line between spells and superpowers we aren't looking for mutants here and in general if there is a scientific explanation for it it's not really magic to me 3 healers don't get a free pass we're looking for offense here during weapons month so if you're a white mage good for you but you also need to be able to fight for a spell caster can use a weapon but they're cheap weapon should be the spells themselves I like the idea that when fighting toe-to-toe with a soldier or a fellow caster the mage will choose their spells first weapons endowed with magic don't count unless it's the caster themselves who enchanted it or somehow earned it 5 psychic powers aren't magic that's its own thing and 6 if your magic turns out to be smoking mirrors that makes you a good magician but not really a spell caster I know that's a lot and even so people are still going to be calling me out on my choices so please try to respect my opinion and if you can't well I cast flame shield and with that said I am the green scorpion and ice summon forth the top 10 greatest videogame spellcasters no fooling around this week at number 10 we have Sipho Bell nadas from the Castlevania series she grew up in the community of witches in the mid 1400s but after her people were slain the young cypher swore revenge on Count Dracula and was trained as a hunter in the Eastern Orthodox Church her arcane heritage and her divine training made her an interesting caster with mastery over fire ice and lightning these three powers are very common forms of magic and video games here referred to as the elemental Trinity fun fact in psifas backstory she travels in disguise as a man knowing that the church would never let a woman join the hunting parties but this was mistranslated in the english version and in the english instruction manual to Castlevania 3 it originally stated that cypher was a man this led to a lot of confusion among players the apex of which was psifas appearance in the captain and cartoon as an old geezer after trevor frees her from a statue Sipho joins the cause to stop the vampire bringing along her incredibly useful sorcery it's harder to appreciate the extent of her magic and 8bit so luckily we have Castlevania judgment she doesn't always have time to recite a full spell so she also taught herself to clock someone with her staff not to mention she can unlock her book a forbidden witchcraft to unleash the elements in their purest most destructive forms and a death wish and the mother of the Belmont clan Sipho is a sorceress you want with you to kill a vampire you must learn the difference between the wicked and the righteous okay guys you probably already know by now that I love Fire Emblem this is the fifth time I've used it for weapons month and one of my toughest picks yet how am I supposed to pick just one mage from the entire fire emblem catalog the challenge is that while some characters have different stats that might make them preferable everything playthrough is different and every player will attach themselves to different characters I played Sacred Stones and I trained our turn to be an unstoppable Bishop but maybe you prefered Lutz pension for anima spells maybe in blazing sword you start using air cried away and Maxim by the end of the game or maybe when Athos joins the party you are blown away by his great starting power Soren Bastion mkhaya they're all good choices so for my choice I finally had to pick my favourite Fire Emblem game and look at who my main caster was from fireman awakening this is Darja practically the opposite of Sipho Darja is a creepy sadistic dark mage as scary in person as she is on the battlefield she fights for Crom mainly as an excuse to kill or experiment on more people and she has a really unsettling interest in the avatar character Robin so basically her job is gruesome killing and her hobby is stalking you she also has an interest in hexes and curses through different support conversations you'll discover that she has magical concoctions that cure the common cold make people ill turn them into mindless slaves help her tell the future and if she can get it just right make people fall in love with her despite her macabre activities her reliability in combat makes her a good psychotic to have around Darja is a dark mage which is like a regular mage only she uses different spells and has a tendency to be a little slower and tankier the idea of a mage is that they can attack from one space away like the archers to get free hits on enemy units unlike the archers though they can also attack up front so they can counter-attack if they get approached by a fighter or cavalier the downside is that mages can't take a lot of hits but there are ways of making up for this she uses spells by equipping dark tones including Nosferatu which lets her steal people's souls while healing herself her passive abilities are hex and anathema which make it harder for her adversaries to dodge her attacks and without getting into reclassify Jack can be upgraded into either a knight or a sorceress and while dark knights gain elemental spells and the ability to cast while on horseback I prefer Darja as a sorceress as such she learns vengeance which can add damage to her spells equal to half the amount of the damage she's taken combined vengeance with a fully stocked Nosferatu spell and thar just ready for the frontlines better she vents all that sadistic witchcraft on the enemy imagine that tails was a humanoid kid with white hair still a genius but instead of building planes he studied the mystic arts that's genius sage in a nutshell Lloyd Irving is the hero of tales of symphonia but his best friend genus has his back through the entire game raised by a sister in a small village genus took to his studies outshining everyone in his class despite being significantly younger than the others not only is he a whiz at history math science and cooking he is also one of the world's best magic users so when he and Lloyd get banished from their hometown Colette and the gang are quick to invite him on their expedition life lesson kids always befriend the mage granted Genesis skills aren't entirely based on natural talent he and his sister are half elf so magic just runs in his blood and his powers are even more enhanced by the ex fear he got from his friend marble but genous also possesses an unmatched intellect and throughout the game he just gets more and more powerful he cast his spells through a kendama a weird toy that seemingly only he can use in battle his physical attacks are next to useless but by bouncing that little rubber ball around he can cast spells that get more and more awe-inspiring the higher level he gets psifas got the elemental Trinity but genius commands spells in seven elements fire lightning ice water wind earth and even a light spell the only style in the game that he doesn't cover is darkness cuz really he's just too sweet he's a little bit of a torque but as long as there's someone to keep the monsters away from him he'll be sure to end the fight with giant stalagmites volcanic eruptions otherworldly thunderstorms and screen-clearing tsunamis by reconciling with the elves he can learn his ultimate spell meteor storm which makes most other attacks in the game seem pointless if there is one thing that really does hurt genius though in his ranking it's his dependence on his allies his spells require him to monologue for several seconds leaving himself wide open to attacks which when they hit interrupt the flow of the spell there are ways to upgrade him to minimize this problem but he really isn't designed for one-on-one confrontations that said if he's with his teammates he pulls his weight tenfold so it's not really a deal breaker but as you'll see the other adepts on this list do just fine on their own this was another tough one how do I pick the best magic user in League of Legends I started by picking out all the AP casters then from a flavor standpoint I removed the champions whose magic damage was actually coming from technology or something external that barely made a dent so I was going to default to my personal favourite re but just to be super thorough I perused the lore pages again and came up with my choice Ryze the rogue mage magic is pretty common in runeterra coming from a number of sources and those interested in learning its ways can do so at a university studying fundamental charms are even Tecna Turkey but Rhys wasn't one for traditional schooling so instead he travelled the lands meeting Hermits warlocks hidden villages basically anyone who could teach him what the schools couldn't and he collected a lifetime of obscure incantations in his books and Scrolls eventually he came across thorn magic a lost practicing witch a mage tattoos runes on to their own skin this not only made Rhys a mightier wizard it transformed his body into an entity of magic itself not aligned with any particular city-state he works at the Institute of War as the world's foremost authority on spell craft helping countless people including fellow champions with their esoteric magical problems oh and he also carries a giant indestructible scroll on his back that if anyone ever read it it could destroy all life in the world and devastating Armageddon yes I know Nocturne sliced through it in the promo but if you look closely it seems to have repaired itself a few frames later if this thing fell into the wrong hands runeterra would be reduced to ash the sad irony of Rhys is that despite being a master of the unknown arts he only uses four spells and truth be told I don't really like playing Ryze as much as I actually like Rhys himself but let's go over his kid anyway Rhys has narrowed his spell book down to specialize in lightning and snares Rises main damage comes from his new spell overlooked he's also got rune prison to root enemies in place and spell flux which does less damage but bounces around to hit multiple targets lowering their magic resist great spells but there are three great qualities that though I still don't play him make him great overload skills off of ability power but also off of Rises maximum mana making for some unique moveset for rise Rises ultimate desperate power gives rise a supercharged for up to seven seconds giving his other spells the effect of spell vamp with all of that spell vamp rise actually becomes remarkably tanky for a mage my favorite is Rises passive arcane mastery with this every time rise casts a spell his other spells lower their cooldown by one second this arsenal of magical qualities encourages machine gun casting to do maximum damage and keep yourself healed up just stroll over to your enemies make sure smart cast is on and pound your fingers on that keyboard like Schroder at the Christmas pageant John what kind of script writing is this okay hear me out on this one Ganondorf it seemed weird to me at first - I was totally prepared to put bottie or Princess Zelda herself on this list but Ganondorf is quite the formidable warlock and who is the one ultimately ordering bottie around Ganondorf who consistently defeat Zelda unless link is there to do the grunt work Ganondorf he's not the big bad of Hyrule for nothing after all so let's take a look now we know that demises spirit is responsible for the evil that will always oppose a highly Android family but the sad thing is that Ganondorf started out as just a man a rather decent one of that and is it just me or could Ganondorf totally be a descendant of Bruce seriously Bruce and his buds flying off to parts I know that the end of Skyward Sword the Gerudo totally could be an element bastardization of his name since groose loved naming things after himself they have yellow eyes and red hair and if Ganondorf becomes the holder of the Triforce of power well who are the three heroes that were against here him at the end of Skyward Sword link Zelda and gross just give Ganon a pompadour in my life completely off the topic where is it oh here it is in his quest to get his people out of the desert Ganondorf became obsessed with the power of the gods eventually stealing the APRA mentioned Golden Triangle he was raised by his surrogate mothers The Witches Combe and kotake so he was probably raised with some magical know-how that was only enhanced with a Triforce let's just list some of the things that we know Ganondorf can do shooting a wave of dark energy that Ward's away Navi throwing balls of electricity deflecting set electricity by backhanding it sending shockwaves to the ground floating channeling his inner hatred to become a giant pig monster called Ganon materializing source from the other turning his shadow into a self-sufficient magical assassin putting his Ganon this into a giant marionette and controlling it to shape-shift turning zelda into a puppet making unbreakable walls of Twilight energy taking a sword through the chest and just walking it off using the power Trident to rain down lightning becoming invisible and incorporeal in darkness spontaneously putting out nearby fire so that you can stay invisible and Oriol teleporting summoning fire kiseop will creating mob lens of darkness in his own image bending countless giant monsters to his will catching zelda in the moment she reveals herself in casing her and crystal and teleporting her to him from a mile away it's really a lot of sorcery when you lay it all down like that but we still tend to forget it because in addition to all of that Ganondorf remains an expert sword master and an unarmed fighter of unparalleled brawn but he probably wouldn't have that strength or his army of Darkness if he hadn't first become a fearsome warlock have I ever mentioned before that I love cave story even if it is hard as hell it also has a great cast of characters and knows just how much exposition to get without losing sight of its primary function as a shoot-'em-up we actually have two big powerful mages here misery the witch and the Mad King follows follows is the Big Bad and is easily the more powerful one but his boss battle is less behold my muster II of magic and more let me show you my true 4 so the number 5 spot goes to his nice misery since she's consistently seen throughout the game as a master of the hexes in the game's lore a witch named djenka trad follows away in the floating island so that he couldn't crack any more havoc but jenkins daughter misery had her own maniacal plans she forced balos to fords the demon crown an all-powerful hat that bestowed dominion of the island to anyone who wore it but balos got the last laugh there by cursing misery so that she'd have to serve whoever wore the crown family dinners must have been really awkward for these two what makes misery such a compelling villain in part is how untouchable she seems at first most of the time she has her cohort Balrog do the dirty work but when she has to act most of the time you don't even get a chance to respond her ability to teleport is seemingly boundless not only can she teleport to you she is seen trapping taroko in a bubble and forth dimensionally abducts her and at another point she banishes quote the game's hero to the labyrinth an ear and escapable prison of her own architecture there's this real feeling of hopelessness when you're left to rust at the bottom of this dank hole if you can't be misery how can you hope to defeat the doctor who is terrorizing the migas but with some fancy footwork you're on your way again and eventually misery concludes that just sending you away won't finish the job and commits to ending you herself learning the pattern to fighting misery is pretty tough and it only gets tougher the more damage she sustained she flies in warps around shooting lightning protecting herself with shadowy satellites teleporting in fire bats and her most fiendish trick yet dropping a rock on you it sounds funny but when I died a misery it's usually death by rock misery also fights alongside the doctor in the not so final boss battle controlled by the demon crown and morphed into a weird Obama her summoning powers get even more ridiculous as she calls in bats power critters and homing fish missiles that's pretty crazy stuff but on occasion misery still enjoys the classics like turning Balrog into a frog misery may not be the strongest of quotes adversaries but her omnipresence in the story and her great use of multiple spells at once make her the best spell caster on that little floating island there hasn't been a lot of quote unquote traditional wizards on this list you know pointy hat along with beards your merlyn's and your Gandalf's I guess I'm just more attracted to the offbeat mages and this next character is about as offbeat as it gets from button kaitos we have MS zu D now don't get me wrong this game is already pretty weird but when this little Tiki thing shows up guiding you through the dimensional rift just what even is it well I'd like to show you but footage for this game is pretty scarce so I'm trying my best to compile some good visual aids for you here despite the sheer confusion that Mizzou D makes me feel I couldn't help but immediately grow a liking to it actually Mizzou D is a sheet and is actually a human from Gama one of the last civilizations on earth below the clouds and floating islands she wears a mask because it's traditional for her tribe and it protects her lungs from the planet's poisonous fog but you won't know this until at least 30 hours after you meet her but despite her expressionless face and distorted voice Mizzou D is actually kind of hilarious and maybe it's because of the distorted voice she refers to herself as the great Mizzou T all the time and can be very full herself justifiable because of what good of a maid she is when you get to the Gama village and meet her mask-wearing brethren you expect them to be just as goofy and eccentric as her but they're not even among her bottom-dwelling spell dwarf people Mizzou T is absolutely abnormal she is the only one truly in tune with her magic heritage she's so magically inclined that she just kind of floats all the time she floats in the air she floats on our chakra and she moves as she walks on air for no apparent reason other than being weird and I love it along with Shella Mizzou Dee can use the spell Magnus's which cover the elements of fire water light darkness wind and Chronos yeah Chronos why time is a main element and why it's considered to be the opposite of wind is utterly beyond my comprehension much like this game but Mizzou Dee's finishing moves are what really get just confusing the lowest level of these are physical element magic the only cards of that type in the game they include breathing magical flops and freakin eating people the first time I saw this I think I had a traumatic breakdown and that's only her level three she opens dimensional barriers to drop totem poles on people she attached with her shadow she summons her own giant and it's not enough for her to take a big water or fire finisher no she makes them to these giant water serpents and giant fire lions even the descriptions of these spells in the menus have Mizzou DS weirdness written all over them I just I don't even well Mizzou D isn't just powerful she's creative and just unlike anything I've ever seen before I can only hope she's one of a kind I talked about how good misery is a teleporting magic but dementia Oh from Super Paper Mario just takes that to a whole new level as his name suggests he is a master of dimensions and since that's the central theme of the game that makes dementia Oh a pretty important guy at first he works for Count black the supposin main villain but as the golden rule states never trust the clown he spends the entire game plotting standing back or rather floating back and letting Mario collect the pure hearts as part of his big chest like strategy for world name multiverse domination as far as spells go he doesn't showcase as many different abilities as misery or misery but its quality over quantity here dementia oh is really savvy to the situation only fighting when he has to and I think most of the time he's actually holding back since he ultimately needs you for his plan to work like Mario dementia oh can ship dimensions exploding the game's 2d world by moving to the third dimension but dimensions powers also extend to alternate dimensions ie other worlds considering that you have to use these special gates open by the pure hearts to visit other universes it's pretty scary that the mentio can just warp to other planes on a whim he can also banish people in a similar fashion to misery but instead of just throwing them into a dark dank e smelly cave he throws them into the Paper Mario equivalent of hell or to the D dimension a demi plain of his own creation where he makes the rules bending physics logic and more importantly stats to his liking his signature attack looks like he's cropping someone on mspaint he can do this to trap someone in a box then produce cataclysmic explosions to incinerate his victims into fine powder or just not their HP to zero that works to the men she also has a sense of humor about his magic he is something I really appreciate in a caster did you happen to find that room in blex castle filled with hundreds of the men she owns they don't even hurt you he just keeps body doubles and storage for some reason he's an evil humorous jester and that's just the way I like it King Kingdom Hearts 3 come out already I want to kill Saiyan ort this man is behind everything I'd repeat everything that has gone wrong in the King of Hearts series his obsession to open kingdom hearts and reconstruct all worlds has been the ongoing line in the background for seven games and no matter how many times he gets killed he just won't die let's take a look at this he was already old as dirt in birth by Sleep and just when he's defeated by Terra he uses his powers to transfer all of his essence and knowledge into Terra essentially possessing him Terra managed to fight him off long enough to lock away his memories but this was just a slight delay for Zayin orts ridiculous gambit as Terra norts he then became an assistant to Ansem the wise stole his name and completed an experiment to create organization 13 his soul becoming the heartless Ansem and his body becoming the nobodies xemnas Sora killed both of these effective hexes only for Ansem to live in riku's hearts and xem this to come back because who the hell even knows and because both halves were destroyed and made a way for the master to truly resurrect himself how did he do it by time-traveling Xan ORD had so much foresight so many backup plans that as a child he times skipped into dream Drop Distance set everything from Maleficent's conquest to Sora's own journey in motion and made it possible for his future self to return as a leader of a second organization xiii made up of all the members that are in at least some way partly Saiyan ort including Ansem and xemnas again just what the hell man why won't you die his Voldemort like immortality might make him impressive enough but he's also a genius when it comes to magical combat he is a keyblade master so I might have disqualified him for having a primary weapon but unlike Sora and the other holders Zayin ort uses his Keyblade mainly as a conduit for his sorcery only occasionally actually swinging it and even then he's pretty nonchalant about it he leaves the acrobatics in melee fighting to his apprentice Vanitas who by the way he also created by warping the magic of the human soul I think his big fight against terra aqua and Ventus best puts his power into perspective he uses most of his spells without even holding the Keyblade freezes vent is solid and practically shatters him has enhanced strength that I can only assume is supernatural and he uses the rare earth magic to terraform the landscape to his will effortlessly forming mountains to get to high ground he can also just levitate hundreds of key blades to chase down his foes I think this guy also deserves the credit for what his demon spawns do because they are entirely composed of him Ansem uses all sorts of shadowy projects usually seen fighting with his big heartless monster coming out of his back he also commands a heartless with an iron fist and can continue to torment Riku even after he is day eventually overpowering the lad so that he looks just like Ansem Zen this is even more powerful while the other no bodies have mastery over fire water death or time Zen this bends reality itself in a way that even dementia couldn't dream up he also shoots lasers from all angles or freezes them in his hands to use his lightsabers and in dream Drop Distance he regularly throws 40-story buildings at Sora by waving his hands and all three of these villains of course have mastered the art of teleporting all over the freaking place Square Enix you said that Kingdom Hearts 3 would be the end of the Z Nord saga please let that mean we can finally dig this guy a grave let me repeat myself never trust the clown there were a lot of characters from Final Fantasy that I could have used here tell Tara hope Lulu in fact I really wanted to do an entry on BV but then we never destroyed the world Diddy I'm not just default because he's so popular either kefka puts all of the other measly wizards to shame i don't need to explain why kefka such a good villain again because I've already done that before and if you're looking for another analysis on the religious imagery in this boss fight I can point you to a few other countdown artists who have done it better let's just look at him as a spellcaster as the story goes he was Emperor guess stalls first guinea pig for creating magic tech Knights by augmenting individuals with the raw elements of magicite which are actually dormant magical creatures called espers you could argue that this is why kefka is so unhinged as a side effect of the magicite but either way it should be noted that kefka was not born a powerful mages he was actually made one in fact the first few times you fight him his spells are actually pretty puny in the grand scheme of things at this point kefka gets by not by force but by conniving endearing himself to the king playing the role of the witless peon poisoning Domas water supply and surrounding himself with much stronger magitek knights as the game progresses he collects more magicite and you'll notice him steadily becoming more powerful by the time you get to the masa he is strong enough to withstand the attacks of a dozen Esper's with nary a scratch and convert them into magicite in the blink of an eye then he heads to the flying continent at this point he is able to create impenetrable force fields and cast freakin Ultima so it stands to reason that by this point he can access all of the spells available to the player including thundaga blazar firaga gravity' meteor holy and flare he then proceeds to push the statues of the tree ad out of alignment destroying most life on the planet and becoming the new god of magic but wait didn't I say no gods and my rules at the beginning well I think there's an important detail to glean from this kefka may end up a god of sorcery raining his judgement over the world from on high whenever he feels like it but remember that at one point he was just a man he got this chance to gain a little bit of magical potential in his veins and from there he scraped and clawed his way to divine power able to take any form and reducing cities and civilizations to ash as shrines to his own nihilism wow this is a really awfully evil list isn't it ganondorf's enormous Reda menschell heck Darja fights for the good guys but she is pretty darn insidious and rising Mazu t get pretty dark when you really delve into them I guess a sad truth is that those who approach magic with no inhibitions or moral restraint tend to achieve more power good ultimately prevails over kefka but it takes a dozen heroes or four that have been thoroughly level grinded to overcome this one Dark Lord in his frenzy casting I guess that's not a very happy ending to this list but as long as there is good in the world or gamers who want to finish the game those evil warlocks have their days numbered I am the green scorpion and if it weren't for these all-powerful mages we want to get the chance to defeat the undefeated so I guess thank you kappa for destroying the world it just means that we got to save it thank you all for watching and I'll see you guys next time you you ah I threw a rock at him

Channel: The Green Scorpion

Views: 89,606

Rating: 4.9116721 out of 5

Keywords: yt:stretch=16:9, greenscorpion64, countdown, top ten, video game, Video Game Culture, spellcasters, magic, sorcery, gameplay, commentary, review, Best, Top, Greatest

Id: 2T1q4u3bkdo

Length: 34min 19sec (2059 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 22 2014