Everyone loves a good uniform. They are a signifier of who you are, in a short sentence. Firefighters are protected and easily visible, and doctors have all their scrubs. Maybe that suit means you’re… doing business. And maybe that habit is that of a nun, something the media seems to have a fascinating obsession with.
In reality, it’s quite difficult to find nuns in games who actually practice the faith, and oftentimes they are a very different version of the real thing. Often a non-character is primarily focused on the aesthetics, rather than the lifestyle.
7 Bridget – Guilty Gear
Guilty Gear has a delightful plethora of characters on display, from an American who revolves around his alien friend, to Jack-O, the creator of the famous pose of the same name. You know it. Then there’s Bridget, who has quite a charged backstory.
Despite the Anglicized name of an Irish god turned Christian saint, Bridget was born in England and actually has no religious association at all. Although he was raised as a girl to evade a village superstition, he is proud of who he is. The thing is, despite being dressed in the clothes of a stylized nun, he’s really just a bounter hunter.
6 Lady Of The Charred Visage – Blasphemous
As for profanity, we have Blasphemous. In a game that focuses so heavily on religious themes and a world ruled by a cruel divine power, you might expect nuns aplenty. In reality there are very few, confined to a single isolated monastery high in the mountains.
Throughout the monastery you will fight against various enemies, including many nuns who live in perpetual penance. However, this monastery exists in honor of the Lady with the Charred Face – a woman who hated her own beauty so much that she tried to burn it away with oil. She joined the monastery not long after and devoted her life to the Three Wills.
5 Double – Skullgirls
Skullgirls is a series with a real-life history as complex as its own lore – if not a tad more. In the game, however, characters fight for the Skull Heart, a powerful artifact that can fulfill any wish. It is a beloved fighting game that has had many ports and is supported to this day.
Although not a nun in practice, Double takes the form of one. They are not human, but instead a life form of seemingly divine creation whose purpose is to ensure that the Skull Heart falls into the right hands. They can actually take any shape you want, although a nun might make the most sense if he lives in a cathedral.
4 Leliana – Dragon Age
Of Bioware’s many series, Dragon Age is certainly one of their most popular. From the varied choices, deep knowledge and seductive characters, there is plenty to take care of. Although it is set in a fictional world, the faith of the Chantry is very much akin to that of Christianity, of which Leliana is a devout member.
Now it might be hard to call Leliana a nun in Inquisition, playing the part of a spymaster assassin – though in the original she was just a lilting sister in training with big Joan of Arc aspirations. Dressed in dresses and raised in a monastery, she longs to prove her faith in practice, and will get poetic about it all the way.
3 Sister Adella – Bloodborne
It can be pretty hard at this point not to have heard of Bloodborne, with phone calls seemingly every hour asking for the PS4 exclusive to be remastered and brought to PC. It’s known for a reason, FromSoftware’s rendition of a world of gothic horror brought to life.
While religion is predominant in these genres, Bloodborne has a belief in the Healing Church all its own. Within the Hypogean Gaol, players can encounter Sister Adella and ideally return it to the Oedon Chapel. She’s a somewhat unhinged sort, enraged when you take Arianna’s blood over her own – eventually killing her and lashing out in obscene defiance.
2 The Saints – Hitman Absolution
The Hitman series has had quite a journey. Very successful until Blood Money, Absolution came along as a soft reboot of the series. It became a much more linear experience, with less focus on targets and more on just killing and running. It certainly wasn’t a big change, but it did make for a hilariously absurd addition with The Saints.
As you’d expect from the name and rather famous trailer, The Saints were nuns, albeit only in appearance (somewhat of a running theme in games). Actually trained as a network of all-female killers, they’d blend in like humble nuns, but rather… lightly dressed underneath. The fact is that the nun may not have disguised that much, but it didn’t matter because Agent 47 kills them all anyway.
1 Bayonetta – Bayonetta
It can sometimes be difficult to draw the line between tribute and original idea in Bayonetta. The game is such a blatant love letter to Devil May Cry, a series that was also created by Hideki Kamiya, yet is a lot more outrageous than anything DMC has ever tried.
What better way to be outrageous than to kill angels as a nun? Bayonetta starts summoning angels while wearing a nun’s habit, just so she can punish them. She does it again at the end of the game, and frankly, the angels deserve it because they fall for it again. The worst part, though, is that the movie, Bloody Fate, reveals that Bayonetta really does this a lot, disguised as a nun as some sort of pastime.
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