What games have the main character that is also the most popular character?

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>I had this discussion came up a few days ago debating whether the main character being the most popular is the norm or the exception, so I decided to compile a list. Please don't include games that have obviously no one of importance besides the main character (for example, if there was a Megaman game without Proto Man, Roll, or Bass, then obviously Megaman will be the most popular character by default). I don't need numbers, but it should be readily obvious that the character is the most popular.

The ones I can think of offhand:

Link - Zelda (not much competition though)
Mario - Mario (ditto here)
Snake - MGS
Cloud - FF7 (I'd think Sephiroth is more popular, but Gamefaqs's character poll says otherwise)
Zero - Megaman Zero
Crono - Chrono Trigger (Gamefaqs says Crono beats Magus on character poll)

Well, if you look at my list, I certainly believe main character being the most popular is the exception... which brings me the question, why? Unlike my other posts, I don't really have any explanation for this. If you agree, why? If you do not believe this is the exception, why not? You'd think the main character you play as ought to at least be a fairly cool person, but it rarely works out this way. I know there is a trend to the 'unlikely hero' but even the unlikely hero is supposed to be an exceptional person in the end... so why so many unpopular main characters?</div>

[Zeus]

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Tomb Raider, Beyond Good and Evil, Crash, Spyro are others i can think of off hand, but I think you're right, it is the exception</div>

[Kupek]

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>I think it's because main characters are sometimes the typical do-gooder protagonists that help advance the game but are uninteresting in their own right.</div>

[Flip]

<div style='font: 12pt "Cooper Black"; text-align: left; '>True, side characters tend to have traits that we find cool; The Badass, The Hot Chick, The Quiet Buttkicker, The Evil Genius, etc. A main character has to be more well-rounded and where is the fun is that? : )</div>

[Julius Seeker]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Final Fantasy III (Terra), Xenosaga (Shion), those are two games where the main character is not the most popular.</div>

[Kupek]

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>That's the thing, they don't HAVE to be well rounded. Better stories might result if they weren't.</div>

[Flip]

<div style='font: 12pt "Cooper Black"; text-align: left; '>very true, i cant believe they havent made an RPG with a villain main character yet, it would seem so easy and fun.</div>

[SineSwiper]

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Like say, Chrono Trigger, where you start out playing as Magus, and then eventually join the group.</div>

[Gentz]

<div style='font: 11pt arial; text-align: left; '>That's what happened in BoF4</div>

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>you're the first person I know that likes Shion. Jr./Chaos/KOS-MOS are probably all more popular than Shion.</div>

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>goody-two shoes don't have to be boring</div>

[Julius Seeker]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>The characters in brackets are the main characters, not the mosst popular one, KOS-MOS is the most popular Xenosaga character.</div>

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>There is only one main character.</div>

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>in the few games I've seen that leaned toward that direction you end up getting a villian wannabe most of the time.</div>

[Lox]

<div style='font: bold 9pt ; text-align: left; '>I think KotoR is cool cuz I'd love to go Dark Jedi all the way. I'd kill for a game where you were a total evil bad guy the whole game.</div>

[Tortolia]

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>You can. It's a hell of a lot more fun than the Light Side.</div>

[Gentz]

<div style='font: 11pt arial; text-align: left; '>There's also a new Sims-type game coming out where you play an evil genius. I dunno though. It's a cute gimmick, but on the whole I don't think villains make for very compelling main characters.</div>

[Derithian]

<div style='font: italic bold 14pt ; text-align: center; '>I always considered Locke to be the main character in FF6 or at least he had the most development to him. Then Terra and Celes were tied for second.</div>

[Derithian]

<div style='font: italic bold 14pt ; text-align: center; '>That's why he only listed one.....Fate Rules!</div>

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>The question is what games have main character being most popular. Shion is the main character of Xenosaga but she is not the most popular, so it's not a valid example.</div>

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>But you don't even have to get Locke on the second world. It's definitely Terra in the first world, and probably tied between Celes and Terra on the second world. As for most popular, I don't know... but Terra doesn't strike me as the most popular.</div>

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>That's because most of the time you end up being a villian wannabe that ends up saving the world anyway.</div>

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>The Magus join/not decision is still one of the few decisions in a RPG where there is no clear 'right' choice, and it's something I want to see more. Games may offer multiple branches but it's not a choice when one choice is meant to be better than the other.</div>

[Kupek]

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>You made your point. Now it's just obnoxious.</div>

[Derithian]

<div style='font: italic bold 14pt ; text-align: center; '>You don't have to get terra either. but then again who cares. the game doesn't hold a candle to Fate</div>

[SineSwiper]

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>No right choice? You could A. not get an awesome character, or B. get an awesome character. Obviously, A was the -wrong- choice.</div>

[SineSwiper]

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Heh? Chaos was a character? Seriously, I know he's going to be more fleshed out in the 2nd one, but I just didn't get much out of him. Jr., OTOH, had some good development.</div>

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Having Magus on your party obviously made the game easier, but the plot can go either way. Frog's side story still says he avenged Cyrus, which would imply Magus is supposed to have died.</div>

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Terra automatically comes back at the last battle, too bad you can't hold a candle to your Fate bashing.</div>

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Seems to me he is at least fairly popular. The game obvious saw him as important enough to have all these roles of cosmic significance even though he has no character development whatsoever.</div>

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Terra automatically comes back at the last battle</div>

[Kupek]

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>An interesting plot would be you don't realize the protagonist is really the villian until near the end of the game. He doesn't change sides, he's always been the villian, but as players we assume we play as the hero, and believe his arguments.</div>

[Gentz]

<div style='font: 11pt arial; text-align: left; '>...My main complaint is that the primary problem people perceive with the archetypal "hero" character is not the fact that he's a do-gooder, per se, but that he's a <I>one-dimensional</i> do-gooder. Switching to the role of the villain doesn't do anything for the depth of the character, it simply changes him into a one-dimensional <I>evil</i>-doer instead.

What we actually have to try and get away from are these flat, fundamental archetypes. RPG storylines generally follow the basic fairy-tale/myth/hero-cycle structures that often lend themselves to such uninteresting characters. Hero-cycle stories can still be interesting and exciting, of course, and I think they'll always be the primary candidate for RPG storylines; however, game designers seriously need to start thinking beyond "simple" hero-cycle tales. There's a great deal of play inherent in all the structural aspects of the hero story - you don't have to completely break with these structures in order to create an original story, you just have to mold them into unique and unexpected shapes.

One of the reasons Cloud became so popular is because he broke that one-dimensional hero mold. He was one of RPG-dom's first anti-heroes. FF7 was still very much a fairy-tale by design, but they used the character of Cloud to push the boundaries of what it means to be a "fairy-tale hero." The main idea here is that of modernizing the fairy-tale structures by blurring the lines between "good" acts and "evil" acts, between "love" and "hate," between those events for which we should be held responsible and those for which we cannot be blamed, etc.</div>

[Gentz]

<div style='font: 11pt arial; text-align: left; '>That would be amazingly difficult to do : )</div>

[Julius Seeker]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Chaos was my least favourite. I think my favourite was Jr, but that was mainly because he turns out to be the most powerful and therefore used more in battle. Zigurat definately had a much more cool personality.</div>

[Kupek]

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>Yeah, it would take a quality of writing and scripting I've never seen in a videogame.</div>

[Julius Seeker]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Plus, obviously the ending surrounds her mainly.</div>

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Terranigma's sort of like this... well everything you did has been leading to the Hell's invasion of the real world, but it looked like a good idea at the time.</div>

[Don]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>He has his character flaws but it was still convincing that he was the one who's supposed to stop Sephiroth. When games make character flaws in heroes they tend to forget that heroes can't be so flawed that you're beginning to question why they're the hero at all.</div>

[Derithian]

<div style='font: italic bold 14pt ; text-align: center; '>There is one game we agree on.....Terrranigma was fucking amazing. Still ranks among my favorite games of all time</div>

[Julius Seeker]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>I can't say I like Cloud's character, I found him to be somehow very uninteresting. I didn't hate his character or anything, I just found him to be quite pathetic. He didn't have any confidence, and people who have no confidence are always failures; it's a rule of life.

The only character who I really hated though was Cecil, what a clown =)</div>

[Julius Seeker]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>But the main characters aren't necessarilly working for the forces of evil, just some guy who they thought was good was.

Apollo in Final Fantasy Legend 2 is another.</div>

[Julius Seeker]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>You're on a quest destroying all the Gods and all these evil forces, taking their Magicite, and there is one "good" God called Apollo who is sort of looking over your shoulder, being the big good guy. Then once you have cleared out all the evil, he forces you to give up the magicite, and you discover that he is the prime evil, now with all of his rivals gone, and all of the Magicite, the Universe belongs to him and he transforms into a super God for a fairly major battle towards the end of the game.</div>

[Gentz]

<div style='font: 11pt arial; text-align: left; '>He's not my favorite character either, but the fact that he was something of an antihero made him unique among RPG main characters, and this uniqueness was part of what MADE FF7 one of the highest selling RPGs of all time.</div>

[Julius Seeker]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Final Fantasy 7's sales came because of the pretty FMV. In order for characters to sell copies of FF7, people would first have to know at least something about them, I do not think many people knew much about Cloud before they even played the game.</div>

[SineSwiper]

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Never underestimate the quality of word-of-mouth. People get recommendations from other friends, because the story is neat, and they buy the game.</div>

[Julius Seeker]

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>The game sold well because of a few factors. 1) It had the Final Fantasy name, now Final Fantasy games had not sold as well beforehand, but they did sell quite well, and they were widely known among almost everyone who played videogames. 2) The company "Squaresoft" was one of the most recognizable company names in the videogame market, it perhaps had the third or fourth largest fanbase of any videogame company for years before FF7 was released (Capcom may have been higher, and certainly Nintendo and Sega were). Now with the recognition of the game series name and company, add that onto the fact that Sony backed the game with one of the largest videogame advertisement campaigns in history, and you have the reason why the game sold so well. It had nothing to do with that Squall was a unique character; there have been plenty of games released with unique main characters that sold horribly. The only games I can think of right now where the main character was a driving force behind sales (when the character was original, obviously the characters were the reason why SSB sold well, none of them were original) was Sonic the Hedgehog, Duke Nukem, and Blood Omen: Legacy of Kane.</div>

[SineSwiper]

<div style='font: 10pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light", "Century Gothic"; text-align: left; '>Two, Squaresoft was barely a noticable name in the US, except for the RPG gamers, like us. FF7 MADE it's name, yes, with the huge advertizing campaign. (Hell, they were putting out ads in Playboy.)

I was not making a direct connection between Cloud and it's popular, but an indirect one. Cloud was part of what made the story great, and because of that, was a big part of its sales. Even without the big ads, it would have still made it as a household name, but the ads did help even sports gamers try out an RPG once.</div>

[Gentz]

<div style='font: 11pt arial; text-align: left; '>Dude, I'm not saying that Cloud was the sole reason for FF7's popularity. I'm just saying that it's no coincidence that the most popular and revolutionary RPG of the time also contained the most unique and compelling main character of the time.</div>

[Zeus]

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Ugh. Cloud was one of the main reasons I didin't like FF7, he was a puss-ant hero. Even Locke was better (mainly because he didn't piss off). FF games have never been known for their strong antogonists but rather strong supporting cast and villians</div>