He's really the GM's pet NPC if the GM was that obnoxious guy who wants to be a ninja no matter what the game is

god kai leng is the worst character in any bioware game

just. what a smug snide asshole who serves no purpose other than to make the players angry lmao

any video game period I would put it, and not even intentionally, you know the writer want him to be a "love to hate" badass

He's just flat out detested.

yeah there are some characters i just ADORE to hate, characters that make me seethe and want to punch their stupid faces but it's because their writing is good that i want to do that so i can APPRECIATE it

kai leng literally has no point other than to kill off people we like and mock us about it and there's NO personality other than that so that's not even a fun character

not only does the writing fail to make him compelling, he jars heavily with the setting (He'd fit better in G.I Joe), but he basically only wins his encounters because the cutscene says so.

i know he was one of the main characters in one of the novels or something but we shouldn't need the novels to Understand him

bioware's had problems with that in dragon age too, so much of what made one of the main quests in orlais in DAI deeper was restricted solely to one of the novels, but the griffon stuff in veilguard was also explored heavily in a novel and i think they got the points across pretty well there

AND YEAH

Shepard has killed people out of anger for far less, so having them just not snipe Kai Leng on Thessia makes zero sense even for players, or even entertain the idea of stopping to let him play courier boy to TIM

*even for players that might not care for Thane

thessia is the worst offender of that, like i could buy everything happening during the coup on the citadel playing out the way it did

but it makes NO sense, especially for the point in time where thessia's mission takes place, for kai leng to just twirl out there without breaking a sweat

Not to mention it's clear he's meant to be a rival/archenemy but he arrives too late for that to properly peroculate - not to mention he's competing with far more established characters... asides from there's no need for an archenemy in ME's narrative

oh no he had a GUNSHIP we fought a gunship on foot in garrus's recruitment mission in me2 and that was nbd????

Kai Leng is the distilled essence of "not this fucking guy again"

Yep

Again, it felt like the Writer's pet OC that he thought was so cool that people would want a game starring him.

(Sci-Fi Hitman is a game idea worth cooking but not with Kai Leng or Bioware handling that)

i get that they were probably like "oh well the best case scenarios on tuchanka and rannoch worked out TOO well we need to up the stakes and kick shep in the gut with a loss" but it felt like SO much of an ass-pull

Thessia did not need Kai Leng

yeah

they were already losing their fight with the Reapers

actually, almost none of his parts need him

he's superfluous to the plot - hell, someone suggested replacing him with the Virmire dead getting the same treatment as Shepard

from Cerberus

still wouldn't been great, but still more motivation than Kai Leng

or even the shep clone from the citadel dlc

bc even if the shep clone acted the same and did all the same stuff, i think there's something to be said there at the very least

"oh yeah this COULD have been shep if miranda actually did put that control chip in their head"

yeah, virmire dead given the chip + resentment for being left for dead (genuine or hyped up by Cerberus)

instead of this dumb edgelord

and if it was the virmire dead it could honestly explain why thessia ended the way it did, because at that point in me3 shep is SO haunted by the dead and the weight of their choices that seeing the virmire dead again could have just

sent them into shock

and they couldn't fight back

yeah, that would actually explain the lack of action.

But it's telling almost every way to improve Kai Leng boils down to "Remove him"

y e a h

outright replacing him with another character (Clonepard or Virmire Dead) or rewrite him in such a way that he's not even the same character, or just cutting him.

this is why I put "most poorly conceived" instead of hated, because there's tons of really hated characters that even if badly written makes sense in their game, Kai Leng... does not

(back to the 'unneeded archenemy' the closest thing to an archenemy we get in ME1 is Saren and that's basically set up to make the reveal that he's indoctrinated a plot twist, and the story has no room for personal enemies with everything else Shep has to juggle