Magnificent Bastard/Video Games/Ace Attorney

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

MOD NOTE: Magnificent Bastard is not Complete Monster, and should not be treated as such.

The Ace Attorney franchise is full of these in addition to the many Smug Snakes around. Sure, all the villains in this series get their comeuppance, but some of them were just better at getting their evil ways before their eventual Villainous Breakdown.

  • Manfred von Karma is one of the most ruthless and skilled prosecutors in the series, and you'd best believe that he earned his 40 year win streak. Thanks to being a hardcore perfectionist the man will use every dirty trick in the book to win a case, whether it's as mundane as coaching witnesses and forging evidence, or as shown in Case 1-4, pulling off batshit insane stunts like RETRAINING A PARROT on the off-chance the defense decides to let it take the stand or outright tazing the defense so he can steal damning evidence from them and get away with it for sounding too farfetched to be believable. And when his otherwise perfect record was blemished with a penalty, he killed the attorney responsible for it, and spent years grooming his son to become a prosecutor instead of a defense attorney while coaching him to take the blame years later. Is he a petty son of a bitch? Absolutely, but the man takes it to such crazy lengths that he makes an art form of it.
  • Is Damon Gant a lovable goofball? You bet he is. Is he an excellent boss who'd happily give people money if they ask for it? Absolutely! Is he a devious and power hungry murderer who knows how to play people like a fiddle? Yes, oh yes indeed. Thanks to his manipulations, he's able to land the lofty position as chief of police while blackmailing his chief prosecutor Lana Skye into doing his bidding on threat of having her sister arrested for a murder he committed, and is savvy enough about how the law works to get legitimate evidence against him tossed out of court, with Phoenix only being able to beat him by the skin of his teeth.
  • Introduced in Justice For All, Shelly de Killer is (as his names suggests) a Professional Killer who's the third heir to a long line of assassins for hire. Always performing his jobs calmly and with precision, and always leaving behind a Calling Card so that the authorities know of his involvement and suspicion is not shed on his clients, de Killer was hired to murder actor Juan Corrida by his rival, Matt Engarde, who wanted Phoenix Wright to defend him in trial when he inevitably fell under suspicion. Under the guise of a bellboy, de Killer lured Maya Fey away by alerting her of a phone call at the front desk so that he could abduct her, and gave Phoenix a transceiver for two-way communication, through which he demanded Phoenix get Engarde acquitted, holding Fey as ransom to ensure Phoenix complied. Shortly before the trial, de Killer shot the case's prosecutor, Franziska von Karma, in the shoulder as a "present" to Wright and a warning to those seeking to convict Engarde. Keeping ahead of the law so that Maya would not be rescued all while posing as Engarde's personal manservant, de Killer contacted Miles Edgeworth to testify truthfully about his client, but when the radio transceiver was brought to the witness stand, de Killer betrayed Edgeworth and instead named Adrian Andrews as his client, failing only due to his ignorance of Andrews' gender exposing the truth that he never met her face to face as a client. When told about how Engarde was planning on blackmailing him with video evidence of his killing, de Killer furiously broke contract with Engarde and informed the court that he swears bloody vengeance upon any client who betrays him, a threat that drove Engarde into a panic and got him to willingly confess his own guilty. After the trial, de Killer allowed Maya's safe release and fled the country, being sure to add a recommendation to his website should Phoenix ever be in need of his services before the transceiver self-destructed, leaving nothing to trace back to him. Despite his nasty line of work and the terrible things he'll do to get a job done, de Killer is a calm, civil and polite individual with his own professional moral code, valuing the bond of trust between him and his clients above all else just as much as any good defense attorney.
    • A year later in Investigations 2, fellow Magnificent Bastard Simon Keyes hired de Killer to assassinate President Di-Jun Huang of Zheng Fa, which only ended up getting the assassin's left arm injured by bodyguard Ethan Rooke. Learning of the President's planned speech at Gourd Lake, as well as a planned staged assassination attempt, de Killer bandaged his wounded arm and hid a knife inside the dressing before infiltrating the site posed as ice cream vendor "John Doe," waiting to turn the staged assassination into a real one. When caught in the act by Edgeworth, de Killer agrees to help Edgeworth' investigation just to find the real President Di-Jun Huang. Once satisfied with the investigation's progress, de Killer made his escape by turning out the lights on the President's plane and knocking out all those present, and before Edgeworth passed out, de Killer informed him that he had not killed Ethan Rooke, as he respected him far too much, and left his trademark calling card before fleeing to the other side of Gourd Lake, which was devoid of any police presence to stop him. He makes a return by the end of the game, intent on taking Simon Keyes' life for revenge but ultimately being able to see reason when Edgeworth talks him down from carrying out the deed.
  • In Trials & Tribulations, Luke Atmey manages to set himself up as an Ace Detective while at the same keeping afloat and benefiting from the thief he's hunting. He then falsely gets himself indicted for being the thief to keep from being convicted for his real crime of murdering a CEO. Then the only reason he's even caught is a slip of the tongue and this is after successfully having four of the five crimes he was on trial for has been proven to have not been his doing.
  • Kristoph Gavin deserves credit for being the man who got Phoenix Wright himself disbarred for seven years, and he's so good at covering his tracks both times he killed someone, that Phoenix had to play dirty by falsifying evidence and changing the justice system itself in order to make him face justice for his crimes, all while tricking everyone with a ridiculously convincing Nice Guy schtick. You know you're a brilliant schemer when you force a moral paragon to toss the rules out the window in order to defeat you.
  • One of the most brilliant bad guys in the series isn't a rogue prosecutor or otherwise corrupt lawman, but a completely normal circus worker. Simon Keyes from the second Investigations game runs a ridiculous gauntlet of schemes and murders in order to take down all the people who have ruined his life while tricking Miles Edgeworth into dancing to his tune, and by the time he's defeated his enemies are either in chains or dead. Not bad for a guy who is, again, a goddamn circus worker.
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