Simple thread, who are you favorite characters? You can also pick just one, like I'm doing. I'm sure this has been done before, but I don't see a recent one
Zero
Samurai + cyber punk robot + anti-hero + light saber + character design that literally looks like fire = awesome. What makes Zero so interesting is that he was destined for evil, yet becomes this great hero. He's a guy who is ALWAYS fighting his own dark destiny and forging a new one based on his own free will.
Zero kind of represents what I love about games. He's from a platform series, one of my favorite genres, and he is a melee combat oriented character, and my other favorite genre is beat 'em ups
This is true. I once watched a cool youtube video describing how brilliantly the game turns Zero into a goal for the player. After giving Zero that amazing intro, the rest of the game becomes about Mega Man X a.k.a. YOU becoming as strong as Zero both in terms of game play and in the narrative as well
It's another Capcom one, but I've always really liked Phoenix Wright as a character. While he's a bit on the young side for an attorney (at least in the early games), and the series definitely makes him a bullied underdog like you'll find in a lot of Japanese games and anime, I appreciate the fact that he acts like and is treated as a competent adult. He's not the chosen one and he doesn't have any special powers, he just works hard and pays attention to things, and because of that he comes across as an intelligent person who is very good at his job. I feel like a lot of anime and games embrace this trope where the protagonist is a big, emotional dummy who constantly makes bad decisions but nevertheless succeeds through pure strength of will. And while that can be funny or entertaining sometimes, I feel like it's so saturated popular media (especially stuff coming out of Japan) that its starting to feel really, really old. It's somewhat related to the old, "magical teens who succeed through the power of friendship," lazy writing trope. Everyone is just a big, emotional mess who acts impulsively but they somehow still manage to save the world. Phoenix earns his friends because he listens to people and he solves problems by addressing them logically. It's really neat how, over the course of the series, you see him gradually win people over through intelligence and thoughtfulness. The final case of Trials and Tribulations, which features a huge portion of the cast from the entire trilogy, including former rivals and antagonists, coming together to help Phoenix put to rest a major issue that has been haunting the story since the first game, is genuinely heartwarming.
The fourth game in the series, Apollo Justice, has always been my least favorite because it switches the protagonist to a magical teen and suddenly makes Phoenix dark and brooding, which felt completely out of character. I'm sure I'm not alone in that either, as all of the following games kind ignore everything from that title and hand-wave away most of the things they can't. And while some of the more recent games do lean into various tropes a bit more than I'd like, I do appreciate that they've allowed the characters to age, making Phoenix somewhere in his mid-30s at this point, something that's practically unheard of for a protagonist in a Japanese game (outside of Mario who, we all know, is somewhere in his late-40s). And the relationships of the characters grow and change as they would with time. Seeing an adult Maya interacting with Phoenix after being apart for several years was very sweet, as Phoenix was kind of awkwardly learning to treat his former scrappy kid sidekick as a fellow mature adult.
In short, I really like an adult protagonist in a heavily-anime-influenced game.
