Schtimpy said:
When I played Final Fantasy XII, I always thought of Basch as the main character, what with the story relevance and such. Whenever I went to town, I just thought the "Vaans the only controllable character" thing was just Vaan being sent to buy supplies because the others had better stuff to do.
Man, that would have made the game so much better if I had thought of that. Vaan as Basch's squire. Hilarious.
SKBPinkie said:
Adam Jensen from Deus Ex: HR.
But that's only because of his voice. Everyone around him sounds fine (except for that one awful racial stereotype - you know the one), but he sounds like a car engine trying desperately to make a coherent sound. It completely destroys immersion to hear a dude who sounds like he's got level 30 throat cancer.
Sadly for the voice actor, that is exactly how he sounds (at least with the audio quality in the games).
OT: I'm very tolerant of characters that offend me or are far from admirable(whether intended or not), so it takes something special to throw me off them altogether. I'm struggling really hard to think of one who I truly can't stand. Even characters who I'm put off by at first I can warm up to. Say a writer mishandles a plot line (particularly romance) and makes the protagonist look like an irredeemable creep, I can easily look past that (so long as the romance levels out as to take away emphasis from the creepiness). Or say a Video game characters personality conflicts with the players experience (Nathan Drake), I can reconcile that as a disconnect between the narrative and the game design (which is bad in itself).
But protagonists I loath. That's difficult, because generally the only thing that makes me loath something (in fiction) is boredom. If a character bores the hole off of me that's enough for me to throw my hands up and quit. However doing so makes me forget them rather fast. I can't think of much off hand.
Vaan from FF12 is definitely one of them, but because of the rest of the cast the game was still enjoyable.
I suppose, in recent memory, the character that bored me the most (and therefore I hated) was Kazuma from s-Cry-ed. I can't even remember why since I tuned off the anime about 6 episodes in (you can't say I didn't try). Perhaps it was the highly formulaic narrative plonked on top of an utterly derivative bad boy stereotype (Kazuma), wrapped in an ever escalating "power creep" narrative comprised of cookie cutter antagonists and equally boring ass supporting casts. Now that I think of it, perhaps I didn't hate Kazuma, I just headed the whole show.
Now that I think of it, I hate Tetsuo from Akira, but only because to top off a horrible sub plot of a young girl being the entire movies punching bag (Kaori), at the very end he squashes her in his grotesque transformation (being squashed is one my worst nightmares thanks to that scene). Yeah, fuck you Tetsuo and whoever wrote that sub plot...
Still like the movie though.
Even though I'm often highly critical of things, I have incredibly broad tastes and high tolerance for "garbage" elements (by my closest friends standards anyway). I chalk that up to having a tremendous knack for suspending my own disbelief, even if the writer, director or designer seems to actively try to subvert that.
