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Unlikeable protagonists

Last posted Nov 16, 2016 at 10:27AM EST. Added Nov 12, 2016 at 11:42PM EST
21 posts from 15 users

Never mind how much of a douche you can be to your enemies in combat, we're talking about player characters who are just plain assholes no matter what you do I've got two to start.

Kratos (God of War): Let's face it, "asshole" doesn't even begin to sum up this guy's attitude. Because he was too proud to face his death in battle like a Spartan IS SUPPOSED TO, he cries out to Ares for hax, goes apeshit, kills his family, then decides to basically unleash apocalypse on the rest of the world to get his revenge and clear up his daddy issues.

Granted, Zeus is a total dick, even in canon Greek myth, but you don't fucking half-destroy the world because you're angry. And that's of course not even accounting for his utter lack of regard for the safety of innocents. (Needlessly letting that boat captain die, burning a caged dude to death to open a door, etc.)

Haseo (.Hack//GU): To open this up nicely, he's a teenager right about that angsty period in one's life. He decides to check out The World: R2, he's been hearing a lot about it, and since the old one's servers are long gone, we might as well check out the new blood. So he logs in for the first time and gets griefed by some PKing trolls. This single act of betrayal (Boy let's hope he never plays EVE Online…) turns him into a nihilistic player-killer hunter. Granted, he's great at what he does. After all, he ground out like 130-someodd levels solo in a party-centric MMO.

But when this one chick he likes gets data drained and sent comatose, he ALSO decides to take out a vendetta on the culprit. That's fine, understandable. Except after he too gets data drained and returned to level 1, he is a needlessly rude ass to everybody around him, including folks that either just want to play the game normally or generally The World casually. Oh, and he basically starts stalking this random chick, including dragging her into PvP arena matches despite her firm protests, just because she looks like his bae. He somehow manages to be more standoffish than early-game Cloud in FF7.

Oh, and he's voiced by Yuri Lowenthal and I'm sick of his voice.

Last edited Nov 12, 2016 at 11:44PM EST

Kirito (SAO): That is all much to say…


Oh, and he’s voiced by Yuri Lowenthal and I’m sick of his voice.

I have to agree; Ben Tennyson is literally everywhere! On the other hand, at least he does a much better job than Cam Clarke in FE:Fates as Male Corrin/Kamui imo

Funfact: Him and this guy graduated from the same college.

Last edited Nov 13, 2016 at 02:43AM EST

The Boss (Saints Row): This char is an absolute asshole but it's the good kind of asshole. S/He may destroy half a city for kicks, cause massive amounts of property and collateral damage without any regard for the safety of everyone but Him/Herself or the gang but because of how OTP the series is, you can't help but feel like a badass doing said stuff.

L0rdtr3k wrote:

The Boss (Saints Row): This char is an absolute asshole but it's the good kind of asshole. S/He may destroy half a city for kicks, cause massive amounts of property and collateral damage without any regard for the safety of everyone but Him/Herself or the gang but because of how OTP the series is, you can't help but feel like a badass doing said stuff.

UNLIKEABLE. You clearly like the boss here.

The Sole Survivor from Fallout 4. Bethesda tried to give him/her personality and character by adding voiced dialogue, but it just made him, dull, practically lifeless, and generic and cliche'd as all hell. Army guy sees family get murdered and revenge happens. Because something like that has never been done before.

Lightning(FFXIII): She is the embodiment of what fangirls and Square Enix think Cloud is after FFVII also doesn't help act like cloud/squall clone and being the creator waifu (this poster are on his office)
Squall(FFVIII): He is the mr. no personality with the attiude lone wolf for that prefer the Kingdom Hearts version of him wich he has an actual personality.

Dick Crosby - ウエイバーコホーム wrote:

Kirito (SAO): That is all much to say…


Oh, and he’s voiced by Yuri Lowenthal and I’m sick of his voice.

I have to agree; Ben Tennyson is literally everywhere! On the other hand, at least he does a much better job than Cam Clarke in FE:Fates as Male Corrin/Kamui imo

Funfact: Him and this guy graduated from the same college.

Edit: Kirito is an Anime character, which means he has no relevance to this post.

Obligatory Shinji post. Funny thing is I'm starting to watch Eva like this week for the first time and he's fucking godawful holy shit makes it a chore.


Someone mentioned Corrin above and I'll just go off that. Corrin is bad holy shit. Basically pure retardation. (I'll use she from now on for simplicity because that's how I play). She is meant to be sheltered and all but sheltered doesn't make you fucking stupid. Actually in conquest and revelations (my 2nd and 3rd fates games) I made my corrin look like a little girl and that actually improved the experience because her character made more sense looking 14 than looking like a grown-ass woman.

Like it's not innocence most of the time it's just pure stupidity. The fact that Azura's entire disguise was a veil over her face and Corrin: "wow who was that blue haired girl?" I was cringing from pure stupid. And this happened throughout all the games she was just unbearably dumb. Fates had a good cast but not Corrin. Oh well at least Corrin had character. That's more than I can say for the 3 MCs in Awakening don't even get me started on them.

A lot of create-a-characters I find a hard time getting annoyed/mad at, because most of the time its you whose controlling what they say, what they do, what they are, etc. You made boring generic man and picked the boring generic dialogue for them to say, so can you really blame the game when you go "my characters just generic boring man"?

Many people could say im wrong, and for them they are correct about that. But that's just my take on this.

I'll say this right here and right now though, I don't really play a lot of games from Japan, at least not the RPG's, so my knowledge pool is limited on that. I'm sure there are a shit ton of characters who are hyper-tastically-unlikeable, but I can only draw on the games I know for this, so im going to say this now.

Desmond Miles is one of the worst protagonists I've ever played as. For every create-a-character who is dull, uninteresting, or generic sounding, Desmond Miles is one of the dullest, most generic, but one in which you have no imput in. At no point does he switch from his two modes of thinking/being. Those modes being "I'm Sad and Angry because of stuff" and "I'm too good for any of this shit and bored'. That's literally it for his personality, when he's not acting and sounding bored out of his mind, he's being a moody punk while holding the fate of the world in his hands. He's so bad that they killed him off in 3, and made 2 better games using a silent protagonist. He was that bad a character, that the ultimate no-character is more interesting to play as.

The featureless protagonist is great in my mind as a means of borderless self-insertion. Take Gordon Freeman for example. Other than a framing device and his depiction in extra-game art, he's just a means to experience the game. Characters know who he is and what he's done, but he neither distracts from the story nor creates a "void of personality." That's basically what the later AssCreed games did, I think.

Back on-topic, Not Imporatant (Hatred). Edge incarnate. A remorseless serial killer, gunning down everything he can think of, and topping it all off with setting a nuclear power plant to meltdown (somehow). Granted, he's evil and dickish by design, but Mr. Walking Navy Seal Copypasta deserves mentioning.

Tales of the Abyss' main character, Luke fon Fabre, is a rude, selfish, self-entitled idiot.
Some spoilery things happen about 20 hours in, and he starts to get way more likable, but it's hard to forgive those first 20 hours of whining, general stupidity and outright mean remarks.

Last edited Nov 14, 2016 at 02:30AM EST

The_Applesauce wrote:

Tales of the Abyss' main character, Luke fon Fabre, is a rude, selfish, self-entitled idiot.
Some spoilery things happen about 20 hours in, and he starts to get way more likable, but it's hard to forgive those first 20 hours of whining, general stupidity and outright mean remarks.

Yeah, him and Haseo act very similarly, except Haseo is a dick for longer. (I think. I never finished the second part or played the third.) Bonus points: they're both voiced by Yuri fucking Lowenthal!

Another unlikeable protagonist i can think is the reboot version of Garret in Thief (2014) he is a batman wannabe compared to the original trilogy of Garret mostly becuase the original Garret is cynical and magnificent bastard also he steals becuase has pay the rent and is the only thing he is good at if he's asked why he is a thief meanwhile the reboot version if asked the same question he responds becuase is a thing i do.

I know this one is a standard for most hated protagonists in anime, but my choice is Shiro from Fate Stay Night.

Some things don't translate very well when adapting a visual novel to anime form, and Shiro is probably one of the best examples of how not to write a character who probably didn't have much of a definable personality to begin with. In every anime adaptation of Fate Stay Night, Shiro is the very definition of a shonen archetype, except in every single one of them he's completely incompetent. He's constantly running into danger just so he can be "chivalrous", only to then get the shit kicked out of him. And his dialogue is some of the schlockiest shit ever, even when it's not horribly butchered by fansubs.

Example:
I mean, I get what he's saying here, it's just phrased really badly.

Drake from Drake of the 99 dragons: A brainless and ugly ASSassin is the best way to describe him. He tries way too hard being cool and it ends up being utterly ridiculously embarrassing.

And then there's the part where Drake decided to jump off the window because he gains superpower and he feels invincible… and the fall actually kills him.

glasses jerk from DEAD tube: Then again, like anyone in this crappy manga is even likable to begin with.

Patroklos (Soul Calibur V): I have enough of a love/hate relationship with SCV; the story mode in SCV kind of stinks, and it doesn't help that Patroklos' personality drives me up the heckin wall. He starts off as an easily manipulative idiot, to an jerk that treats the people around him like absolute garbage, to a personalityless dweeb who wants to save his sister. It doesn't help that you switch up your playstyle in the game from easily identifiable (that of Sophitia's), to a non-intuitive type (that of Setsuka).

Giorno Giovanna from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Boring and bland, nothing story-wise is done with his backstory as DIO's son, has a cool Stand but doesn't utilize to its full potential and it becomes way too OP at the end of Part 5.

Black Ops 3 Protagonist: First let me say that Black Ops 3 was my first CoD game and I can say it was a jumbled mess at best. The character both male and female just seem too grissled and gruff with their voices, especially the Male Protagonist's Voice Actor. They hardly had any depth of character, they both just kinda were there for most of the game. The only times I felt for them was during the battle with Taylor where they were trying to get him to snap out of it.

The Transistor wrote:

Giorno Giovanna from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Boring and bland, nothing story-wise is done with his backstory as DIO's son, has a cool Stand but doesn't utilize to its full potential and it becomes way too OP at the end of Part 5.

Confirmed for not reading the new translation.

On topic…Hm. Can I just say that half the League of Legends cast is annoyingly smug?

Colonial2.1 wrote:

Confirmed for not reading the new translation.

On topic…Hm. Can I just say that half the League of Legends cast is annoyingly smug?

Wait, there's a new translation out that fixes Part 5? I apologize then, I should probably check that out since you've brought it to my attention.

Colonial2.1 wrote:

Confirmed for not reading the new translation.

On topic…Hm. Can I just say that half the League of Legends cast is annoyingly smug?

Any specifics on the LoL cast? I'm a little curious

Skeletor-sm

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