Walking through a "Gamestop", I noticed every game has a brooding main protaganist who doesn't care until he realizes that "he is the only one who can save the world". Then out of nowhere he becomes a beacon of happiness despite the fact that his negligence caused half the world to explode (metaphorically). So I ask you, why do they make characters so angsty? To help relate to the people buying the game? Developers seen as a good way to develop a character? It's easier to write a character who doesn't care?
Poll: Why are the newer video game protagonists so angsty? I'm looking at you final fantasy 13...
- Thread starter pancakster
- Start date
Recommended Videos
First off if your looking at FF13 if your talking about lightning. her relization isint "Its all up to me" so dont rag on it for no reason. Now on to the real answer.pancakster said:
Most games are involving world shattering events so can we blame them being angrey and depressed. LIke christ kids will get depressed and angsty when they lose there 2 year girlfriend. So lightning and snow cant be depressed when the worlds kind of scrwed and her sister and snows fiance is presumbibly dead? Would you depressed? I would. Some games are bleh i only came here to try to defend FF13 because i love that game. Just think of it this way would you be depressed if all that shit happened? The purge of an entire city thousinds killed and the world going to hell. I dont blame her or any of the characters in that game.
I rather miss Doom Marine/Serious Sam/Duke Nukem style heroes where you're playing cigar chomping badass out to save the world because dammit, they're the only ones awesome enough to do it and they know it!
Angst annoys me, especially when it's either unwarranted or the main character trait of a character. Just seems so artificial. I quote:
"Oooo, look at me, I'm all brooding and angsty, full of inner turmoil and barely suppressed rage! Am I cool yet? How about if I dress in black and start listening to death metal? Please tell me I'm cool now, I'm so very lonely!"
-The Prince from Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. Eug! Textbook case of ruining a character to try and appeal to whiny teenagers.
Angst annoys me, especially when it's either unwarranted or the main character trait of a character. Just seems so artificial. I quote:
"Oooo, look at me, I'm all brooding and angsty, full of inner turmoil and barely suppressed rage! Am I cool yet? How about if I dress in black and start listening to death metal? Please tell me I'm cool now, I'm so very lonely!"
-The Prince from Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. Eug! Textbook case of ruining a character to try and appeal to whiny teenagers.
I didn't mind final fantasy thirteen as a whole, but after ten hours of playing the game, when character don't change disposition, it gets irritating to listen to them
Wait, Lightning was angsty?
Was that while she was being a badass warrior woman who was completely in control of her life and dealing with issues or while she was happy and content with saving the world?
Seriously as far as protagonists goes she's been one of the least angsty S.Enix characters around, except perhaps Zidane in FFIX.
Was that while she was being a badass warrior woman who was completely in control of her life and dealing with issues or while she was happy and content with saving the world?
Seriously as far as protagonists goes she's been one of the least angsty S.Enix characters around, except perhaps Zidane in FFIX.
In order for a character to grow and develop sometimes (story wise), there must be some sort of personal conflict and realization involved. Personal conflict, growth, and realizations one of the most important aspects of a character and stories. More often than not the circumstances surrounding that persons "angst" is fairly legitimate.
In regards to the Final Fantasy series, most of the protagonists angst is perfectly legitimate. The blood of innocents on your hands? personal trauma? the loss and failure to protect those you hold dear? great self realization of a terrible past? yea...I don't blame them for being rather angry or depressed sometimes.
Simply put; how the fuck would you feel if you were in their shoes? I doubt you'd always act all macho and just "suck it up". Loss, personal conflict, and all those things are much harder to deal with when a great responsibility is being pressed upon you.
In regards to the Final Fantasy series, most of the protagonists angst is perfectly legitimate. The blood of innocents on your hands? personal trauma? the loss and failure to protect those you hold dear? great self realization of a terrible past? yea...I don't blame them for being rather angry or depressed sometimes.
Simply put; how the fuck would you feel if you were in their shoes? I doubt you'd always act all macho and just "suck it up". Loss, personal conflict, and all those things are much harder to deal with when a great responsibility is being pressed upon you.
I'm not saying they should man up, I'm saying they should pick another perspective to tell the story from instead. What they feel is normal to the situation but the games always take that same perspective. Part of this thread was to find out why.
I guess it's because games these days all try and tell this dramatic Hollywood blockbuster story. You can't be running around like a happy-go-lucky character at that point.
mm i dont really care? the only characters i usually hate are the ones that are part of the main story, but dont say anything and essentially dont contribute to the storyline or plot at all
I don't think this is a "newer" sort of trend, seeing as angsty protagonists have been around in abundance in video games for well over a decade, and much, much longer in other forms of media. (Orpheus says hi)
In any case, being a brooding character is not an instant qualification for being badly developed. Excessive brooding can become annoying and even detrimental to the narrative, but that can be said of any quality. Angst is generally just an easy and effective way to represent development, as someone said above, and so it's used often. No real crime.
In any case, being a brooding character is not an instant qualification for being badly developed. Excessive brooding can become annoying and even detrimental to the narrative, but that can be said of any quality. Angst is generally just an easy and effective way to represent development, as someone said above, and so it's used often. No real crime.
Marketing, being whiny sells in these dark times ruled by weaboos and Twilight fans...
I miss the old days when pounding a villain's face into the rocks with a sledgehammer was considering a "selling point"
Anyway, fact is the majority of JRPG (or should I say Japan Made Linear Adventure Games - JLAG) fans like, so they get to decide due to being the market majority, same way Westerners seem to be into the sci-fi Space Marine action man... If you're in a minority, expect to be angry
I miss the old days when pounding a villain's face into the rocks with a sledgehammer was considering a "selling point"
Anyway, fact is the majority of JRPG (or should I say Japan Made Linear Adventure Games - JLAG) fans like, so they get to decide due to being the market majority, same way Westerners seem to be into the sci-fi Space Marine action man... If you're in a minority, expect to be angry
Angst is a touchy area in the characterization department. It's not there so much for marketing reasons as to create a sense of inner conflict to go along with all the fighting, and generally it's not the angst itself that's worth paying attention to but rather the reasons behind it. Even if there's a good reason it can still wear thin on a person's patience, though.pancakster said:
Peter Parker from the Spider-Man comics/shows/movies is like a masters' course in all the right and wrong ways to create an angsty character. On one hand his guilt and sense of responsibility motivate him; they make for interesting character traits and even weaknesses for villains to exploit, and for the most part they're tempered by his snarky sense of humor. On the other hand he'll tend to take his guilt to ludicrous extremes and develop a really obnoxious martyr complex that'll cause him to act like a complete idiot and defy all common sense while going on whiny, irritating rants about how he's a danger to himself and others, beating himself senselessly into the ground until the writers get bored with his senseless melodrama. He'll go off and sulk and brood while he could very easily be taking action or making a plan. Ol' Spidey will flip-flop between being a guy with more than a few problems in his life to being a self-absorbed jackass frequently, depending on who's writing him and the tone of the current story. Yet it's not necessarily the angst we remember, but rather the fun, wise-cracking, intelligent Spidey who always manages to wrap things up.
Here's another angsty character: Malcolm Reynolds, from Firefly. I don't know if you've seen it, but he's got a lot of issues. Basically he lives in a space western world that parallels the post-civil war era of the United States; he was one of the "Independents," (Confederates), and their side lost big time against the Alliance (Union) when his back-up bailed on him at a huge battle called the Battle of Serenity Valley. Since then he feels like the world's betrayed him; his army never came, and God was definitely not on his side in spite of all his prayers. Yet for Mal, life goes on. He gets work done, he doesn't spend a lot of time brooding or whining, and he's always quick to act. He's extremely touchy on the subjects of the Alliance and religion in particular and he absolutely keeps his past and personal feelings to himself, but these traits serve him well just as often as they get in his way, and he's generally willing to listen to reason, as when he finally gives in and requests medical assistance from an Alliance cruiser in one particular episode when the ship's got to go without its doctor. He's angsty, but it creates interest instead of irritation. His reasons aren't completely transparent, they're somewhat negotiable, and what he's not saying is a subject of interest. His dejection and shattered faith takes the good, kind-hearted man and transforms him into the badass, Han Solo-like persona we love, full of mistrust and interests in self-preservation, and where these elements conflict with his kindness and loyalty to his crew are where his character gets most interesting.
My example for BAD angst is Riku from Kingdom Hearts: specifically Kingdom Hearts 2. In the first game he and Sora are working towards the same goal: find their best friend Kairi and restore her missing heart. Riku doesn't think Sora cares enough about either him or Kairi to actually get it done, however, owing to the fact that he's spending more time running around with Donald and Goofy in various Disney-themed worlds than actually making tangible progress, so the two are put at odds with one another. Over the course of the first game he becomes the Green Ranger of the series when Maleficent recruits him and tricks him into drawing on the power of darkness, turning on his best friend in the process and eventually becoming possessed by his powers. He's freed from their grip by the end, and in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, in spite of all his guilt, he learns that "darkness" doesn't necessarily mean "evil" and learns to control his powers rather than let them control him. It's a good character arc, even if he's a numbskull to let someone named "Maleficent" tall him what to do.
In KH2, however, all that gets turned on its head. Over-use of his powers causes him to have an unnatural transformation, and not being able to bear having his friends look at him the way he is now he goes into hiding, only showing himself very briefly to check up on how Sora's doing before fleeing without a word. It's cowardly, and when they actually do meet and Sora does see him it turns out not to be even a remotely big deal. What's more, this whole time Sora's just left wondering about whether or not his friend's been hurt, which causes him to make a lot of dumb decisions. If he'd just come forward and explained that he was fine and told Sora what he knew about what was going on instead of sulking in the shadows a lot of problems in this game would never have occurred. It is thus that he comes to hold the idiot ball for this story.
I'd say angst gets irritating when it's the overriding character trait and when characters ignore what constitutes a blatantly obvious course of action to the players or viewers, and it's especially irritating in a game when the player is forced to follow along with a character's stupidity. It's not a question of characters being angsty so much as a question of bad writing; of writers sewing the seeds of good inner conflict versus oversimplifying and just making characters angsty and depressing for the sake of doing so and mistaking it for an interesting character trait.
Zidane was coolAmnestic said:
now i have stated in other places that i hated ff13 but it was the combat and the fact that you can really only go one way and the story was crap unless you read all that shit they give you, you dont know whats going on but lighting was a good char snow pissed me off though he really did
Agnsty characters do seem rather common in games as of late, and that has irritated me to some level to the point of leading me to avoid JRPG's in general. You can only play as so many angsty characters before you get irritated and just want to do something else.
You forgot Bartz from FFV.Amnestic said:
OT: You're wrong, you said every game had a brooding protagonist. Ever played the Mario games lately? Yup he's sure sad about his life and beating himself up.
Though I get the feeling you are mainly talking about JRPGs and that's far from the truth, sure a lot of them do have those kinds of characters (You can blame the success of FFVII and its brooding protagonist) Many JRPGs also have pretty upbeat or well rounded personality characters in them.