Do you care about characters and is it important?

[Ren3004]

I like when the characters are fleshed out. I do not, however, need to know everything about their lives from the moment they were born.

 

[velcthulhu]

It depends. Having good characters can improve a game immensely, but a game doesn't need them to be good. That said, if they're important to the game, they'd better be good; there's nothing worse than a game trying to make you care about its awful characters.

 

[Dr. Wily III]

Well I cared about Crono in Chrono Trigger after

Spoiler

he was killed by Lavos. I was like: "wtf? You just can't kill the main guy, he was my strongest Character!"

Oh, and I cared about Price and the guy who does the Sniper Mission with you in Call of Duty 4

 

[Jark212]

I loved all the NPCs in Mass Effect (I mean the named ones, not just the random people on the Citadel or whatever), save Kaiden. Without the characters, it definitely would have felt like less of a game to me.

In Mass Effect and games like that, I tend to keep a all female death squad. That's how I roll.
Always save the Females.

 

[Otterwuff]

I care a lot about video game characters, to be honest. It's what gives life to a game, some of the best games out there demand that your characters are developed and to some extent fresh.

I might get some negativity for this opinion, but I was actually particularly fond of Tidus (FFX). Sure, he's got that whiny attitude and stuff, but he was young and he was just trying to get back to Zanarkand. To me, it felt real. Certain scenes seemed a bit forced and were embarrassing (laughing scene, I'm looking at you) but FFX is my favourite FF game (played them all except XII) because of the characters and the story.

Same goes for many other games. Half-Life 2, as mentioned so very often, is one of the best games when it comes to personality, fleshed out characters, ect. I don't think I need to say much more.