Naturally, what you can do with your lead character has gone through its own metamorphosis. Limitations had us starting with silent protagonists leaping through pipes or smacking weird flan monsters in dungeons. Sure, you got rudimentary RPG's back when I was a tiny person, but those weren't the norm unless you had a personal computer long before anyone else did and messed around with games like Ultima. Eventually hardware advanced and developers had more space to work with, so we were given grander stories of personal strife, love, loss and triumph. More recently, if we count recently as the last twelve years, there's been a sort of mix between the two, a half and half approach.
My early childhood was filled with characters that didn't talk much. I begged my mother for pretty much every Sonic game that came out, even the spinoffs like Spinball. I liked Mario to a lesser extent as well. Despite that, when games started having plots, I quickly preferred that. Oh, I still get any decent Sonic game that comes out, even story light ones like Sonic Superstars. That love has been lifelong. But there are few times in my life when I distinctly remember a shift in myself, in my way of thinking.
One of them is playing Final Fantasy II on SNES*.
I'd borrowed it from a cousin on my step-fathers side of the family. For as long as I'd had it, it was one of those almost transformative experiences. We didn't have a home computer until 1999, so in 1993 or 1994 I'd never experienced the sort of storytelling that PC players were more familiar with, but once I got a taste, I wanted more. I didn't finish it back then. I must have been seven or eight. The CPU in the Giant of Babil was a wall I couldn't get past. But I thought about the game long after I had to return it. I'm sure you're shocked it's still in my top three of the franchise, beyond even VI.
What can I say? Formative experiences have more weight in personal rankings. I'd wager that's part of why people revere VI the way they do. It was their first time experiencing a game like that.
Since then, silent protagonists fell a bit out of favor with me. I still play plenty of games with them, but if a game takes any sort of stab at having a story, I often wonder what the point is if the choice is made for the character to keep quiet. I'd like to hear them converse with other characters, share viewpoints, have opinions on things that are happening.
Maybe this is why I'm one of the five weirdos in the world who has never really fucked with Zelda. The only ones that ever grabbed me are the weird ones, like Majoras Mask, or ones that take a wild swing into something new mechanically like Breath of the Wild. Outside those games, a lot of the franchise is kind of samey. Same sub weapons, same styles of dungeon, same basic plot. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's Malibu Stacy with a new hat, but it's not lost on me that the only ones that ever grab me are the ones that do something wild in the game mechanics.
Hell, even Metroid, a series I actually do like, could probably do with having her talk every once in a while. Heresy, I know. Yes, I remember Other M. The problem with that game was that the writing was bad. It had nothing to do with Samus talking.
Which, yeah, the writing can make or break something like that in general. It's the difference between The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind and every Bethesda game that came after. Morrowind, you're just a player avatar who chooses some questions so people can exposit in your direction, but Morrowind is such a richly detailed game that you don't need to have a character to be invested in the world. Thought went into every strange aspect of Vvardenfell and it shows. Even the main quest is interesting, which cannot be said about any other Bethesda game.
It's the difference between the Bethesda written Fallout 4 compared to the Obsidian written Fallout: New Vegas. One's a rich adventure populated with interesting characters, plots and locales. The other is Fallout 4**. Hey-o!
I get the base appeal. Hell, Todd Howard says it outright. It's a power fantasy. That's a concept that goes back a long way. Not all are like the games Bethesda puts out these days, where they go above and beyond trying to make you feel like the most special boy ever to walk the land, but the base idea is that they're supposed to be blankish slates you can see yourself in, that you can inhabit. Even Link. They don't talk so you don't break from that feeling because of a reminder they have thoughts of their own. There's some merit in that. But you can be a power fantasy and still be interesting. Hell, Captain Marvel had it figured out back in the forties; a kid who turned into a superpowered man when he spoke the phrase of power would would hang out with an upright tiger in a suit and fight a psychic worm.
Huh. Now that I think about it, going by that last example and Morrowind, maybe the trick is to get weird.
I actually felt somewhat vindicated recently. Did you play the Dead Space remake? If not, shame, you've got plenty of company. That's probably why we're not getting a remake of the second one. Regardless, that's a game that went from the protagonist, Issac Clarke, never saying a word in the original to actually interacting in the remake. The game was better for it.
My friend had been worried in the lead-up that they'd make him too chatty, have him react to the horror elements too much and by extension undercut the tension, but it turned out he only spoke when other characters were involved. It improved things a lot. Along with the better writing and better voice acting, giving Hammond and Kendra a voiced Issac to interact with made the conversations feel more natural. In the original game, they're always talking at you. Now, they're talking with you. It alleviates some of the pressure since they no longer need to hold up everything themselves. Issac can pull some weight. I ended up more engrossed in the story and game, which I actually didn't expect.
Most of the memorable stories in games, the most unforgettable moments, involve characters. If Final Fantasy VII's Cloud is just a blank slate rather than the glorious mess we get, does it hurt as much when his love interest dies? Does him piecing his mind back together in the lifestream even work? Because it's all memories and backstory of that character, not anything the player got to choose. If V isn't given dialogue in Cyberpunk 2077, can it be a story about facing mortality and your own legacy in the same way? Does the sequence in Clouds hit the same? Does Johnny Silverhand hit the same if he's just monologueing to a proverbial wall the whole game? Would Red Dead Redemption 2 make me cry if Arthur Morgan isn't a fully realized character with his own history, thoughts, dreams and morality?
Fighting a big pig for some golden triangles is cool and all, but I'm not going to think about it long, long after I'm done the way I did some of the previous examples. After finishing Red Dead Redemption 2, I was talking about it with my Discord friends for weeks after. Had the soundtrack looping for almost a month, despite already hearing plenty of it. Steam tells me I'd put in five hundred hours by the time I was finished. For all the time I'd spent enjoying Mario games, nothing has stuck with me quite like the moment Aerith died and Cloud spent the rest of the game grieving.
Well, except the music. To this day I randomly hum Bob-omb Battlefield out of nowhere, to the annoyance of my friends. That shit's seared in my brain like the image into a projection TV that was left on a paused screen too long.
It wouldn't fit every game. I wouldn't suddenly want every game to have protagonist dialogue or fully voiced characters. I don't need my player avatar to spout things in the middle of a round of Peak. Your banter with your friends is the draw in co-op games. But for a majority of games, I don't know, if they bother to have a story I don't think they need to be mute all the time. The idea that I can't immerse myself if I'm not pretending the character I inhabit is me in the game world always seemed odd to me.
Even Final Fantasy XIV's Warrior of Light, ostensibly a player avatar themself, will at least give a stoic nod or two and let you choose some things to say to your friends.
Was there a point to all this? I don't know. I felt like writing and this was what was on my mind at the time. Word vomit everybody! The best part of having your own blog, audience or not, is you can write whatever the hell you want. You can say "it's my blog, I can write whatever the hell I want".
* If you're not in your late thirties like me you've probably only ever seen the game by its actual name, Final Fantasy IV. Short version is that for around fifteen years, Final Fantasy II and III never made it to American shores. Worried just putting out a game called Final Fantasy IV without the other two would confuse people, they just called it Final Fantasy II in America. V didn't make it over for roughly a decade either, so when VI came over it was just called III. Around Final Fantasy VII they just said fuck it and reverted to the regular number scheme, slowly filling in the gaps in the following years and re-titling II and III to their Japanese numbers for every re-release.
**At the time of writing I still haven't finished that game. I think I put like five hours in it when it came out and just wasn't having it. Incredibly dumbed down and filled with dumb busywork like the settlement building, which modders had already done better. Maybe one day I'll finish a playthrough out of sheer spite. It's how I got through Final Fantasy XIII, a game that made me pretty damn mad at times.
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