My Ideal RPG Character
A Short Essay on Character Flaws in Games
My Ideal Cause Play Character would not be the noble knight or even the enigmatic Cloud Strife. I want my characters to be more complicated and mature than that. For one thing, I love character flaws… BIG character flaws. For me the perfect hero is the hero who not only has to complete the quest before him but fight the monster inside him. If I were to make a game I would take an almost Buddhist approach to character development.
The heroes’ quest, fraught with foes of flesh, is but a step to mend the mind.
Haiku. Ideally all the characters will have some baggage to deal with as it will add greatly to character development and attachments between characters can make or break based on the progress the characters are in dealing with their problems. These aren’t trivial problems. Some of these would be “waking up in the middle of the night screaming in a cold sweat” or psychological problems that can add levels of game play and atmosphere I can only begin to list.
As far as the background of the character goes, I want to steer clear of RPG stereotypes as much as possible. The character can’t have the same tired dark secret that has been rehashed over and over again in past games; the Dark Lord Malakath is my cousin twice removed, I’m actually the long lost king of a long lost land. He can’t be some farmer’s son out on some quest to avenge the ransacking of his village either. Most importantly, he cannot have amnesia. That’s the mother of RPG clichés. The character’s problem should be that he can’t forget! Hell, he should have a substance abuse problem! Start the game in a tavern bathroom stall with our hero puking his guts out. Sure he won’t win immediate sympathy but that’s why they’ll keep playing, to find out why his life has gone to hell in a hand basket. You can also turn his road to recovery into a mini game, call it “Get on the Wagon!”
You’re probably wondering why I chose such an unglamorous blueprint for my character design. Back in the day, the day being early 2001, the now defunct game company Ion Storm created a RPG by the name of Anachronox. It wasn’t a hit but it was a great game and showed what Final Fantasy would look like if someone like Tim Schafer penned it. It had nonstop humor, great characters, a superb story and the best protagonist I seen in years. That man, Sylvester “Sly” Boots. He’s a pathetic drunk when you meet him but when you delve deeper into the story you understand why he takes whisky shots like breaths of air. Anachronox is a journey of redemption as well as self forgiveness for Boots. That’s what I liked about it so much. They made the perfect characters by making them imperfect to a fault. It adds so much more potential to the story.
In closing, if you’re just going to make a RPG about a Galahad the Pure facsimile searching for the TriForce to save princess Zelda, I would probably avoid the game like the plague. The Greeks thought the perfect god was an imperfect god and that how I fell about my characters; no ones a saint so why put one in a game. Without conflict, especially internal conflict a game goes south. Conflict = Character Development= Story development.
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