One of the most quietly fascinating statements you’ll hear in video gaming happened recently, when Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii criticised silent protagonists in gaming.
Now for context, Dragon Quest is a series that has stuck by its quiet heroes, even as it becomes less fashionable.
I think it opens up a wider debate, which warrants an essay – or my essay, to be precise. This is something that has bugged me since seeing Final Fantasy XII’s reception and realising that most fans completely missed the point… but more on that later.
Presenting a story in a video game comes with a lot of issues and major decisions before you’ve even designed a single character. It is always a risk to get it right, though because, even if you do, you have to hope the audience will understand what you’re doing. Some titles need an analytical mind to be playing it, others can just go with the flow.
Silent protagonists are probably the most obvious way that frustrations with presentation can come out. As time and technology has progressed they’ve become harder to do well and as Yuji Horii will be aware of, Dragon Quest XI was a great example of how not to do a silent protagonist. It was a very well-received title, but any scene involving the titular character killed player immersion.
The silent protagonist back in the good ol’ days
See, silent protagonists aren’t what they used to be. In a 2D environment, it was easy enough, as the silent hero would form the link that the player could see themselves as, with yes/no decisions maintaining the illusion of conversation. Faces would be too small to require animating; there was less of a need for voice acting. It worked.
Technology has not been kind to the silent protagonist, though.
Now, most characters are voice-acted, and the graphics tend to be 3D, with larger character models. Saying nothing or not showing emotion sticks out a lot more, especially in dialogue-heavy and emotional games. Dragon Quest XI maintained the structure of a 2D title, where the lead character shows no emotion and doesn’t speak. In the context of the story, it was immersion-breaking.
If a character is silent, then it either needs to be a game without a lot of in-depth conversations like The Legend of Zelda, or without voice acting for any character. It’s a tough balance, because regardless, you need them to still show emotion.
If someone’s died then they have to be sad; it snaps you out of the game if they’re still smiling.
Still, the silent protagonist does have its perks when done right, as it makes the player feel like they are the lead and the one making decisions. Yet, this is a further implicit question that needs to be decided before a single pencil has hit the paper: is the protagonist even a character?
Is Baba you? Or is Baba a character?
That sounds stupid, but it’s true. Is that protagonist a link for the player to mentally insert themselves into the game, or are they a character? Do they have personality, motives and quirks away from the player’s input?
Mentally, it changes the view of the game as on that front, a link is more first-person, whereas a character makes the player more third-person, viewing the events at a distance from the protagonist.
It’s the main reason that Tales of Berseria is such a compelling game and one of the few JRPGs I regularly replay. The lead, Velvet Crowe, is meant to be someone you’re divided on. She’s a horrible person, but you understand why even if you don’t agree with her. You’re not supposed to like who you’re playing as, and while that position fluctuates throughout the game, it’s never clear-cut. Velvet isn’t an anti-hero, she’s an outright villain. You play at odds with the protagonist and ultimately the player is supposed to have a debate as to whether her reasons justify her actions.
In dialogue-heavy games like that, you’re viewing the game in two sections: action and drama, yet the latter is more like something you’d see in a TV show.
Challenging perspectives is important, though. It adds depth to a narrative and can make a title stand out. I think everyone has seen enough stories of ‘good guys who are good, because they’re just good, okay?’
That isn’t to say it always goes well. Final Fantasy XII was one of the more quietly risky entries in the franchise in a move that fans didn’t quite understand. The series up until that point always had a lead character that was in some way extremely tied to a main villain or a major narrative point in the story. This is, of course, barring the first and third entries.
Persistent perspective problems
However, XII’s lead Vaan wasn’t, but that was the entire point. It gave XII a truly unique perspective in terms of the franchise. His connection to the tale was weaker than any other protagonist and laid out in the prologue as he goes along with other far more important characters. He doesn’t have that big twist or stunning connection.
It went over the head of a lot of fans that it was kind of the entire point.
By missing this connection, the game changes the lens through which you view the game: you are purely a bystander. You’re supposed to not feel a ‘personal’ connection to the story and instead more horror at the events that are unfolding.
It was an interesting choice and one that deserves credit, but it wasn’t one that was appreciated by fans and one that Vaan acknowledged, as you can see him below staring up at where the expectations were.
The framing of the game comes through the lead character, so with Berseria, you have Velvet, who purposefully creates distance between the player and what is going on. Vaan puts you close and feeling strongly about what is going on, even if you don’t fully understand it as other characters, such as Balthier in that example, create the link.
Yet they aren’t the sole method of framing as it does depend on how prominent other, often playable, characters are. With Berseria, the majority of the game has six main members of the cast, four of whom are very involved in the story, with the other two either more loosely connected or deliberately obfuscation as to their motives.
The player ends up feeling like a fly on the wall during their debates and plans, but it’s uncomfortable when they pick a bad or immoral action. Yet the result of this is that the player becomes more invested; they might obviously not have a voice in the discussion, but you have an opinion.
Trails of Cold Steel, meanwhile, has a big cast, but everything is specifically framed through lead Rean Schwarzer. Ys has Adol function in an identical way, Final Fantasy Tactics, with Ramza, the recent Final Fantasy XVI – yes, it’s a pretty common approach. Admittedly, the latter is a lot better at giving an insight into the opposition’s viewpoints. I was just trying to not reference VII: Rebirth.
It’s also effectively the evolution of the silent protagonist.
Bold new horizons for the age-old silent protagonist trope
You see everything through their eyes so you end up agreeing with their interpretation of events. They still have emotions and feelings, sure, but they’re designed to act and feel the way a rational person would, so thus the player sees themselves in their shoes. It is framing things as a link while maintaining emotion, voice-acting and facial animation that could quite quickly make the player realise that it’s just lights on a screen, they’re 30, unemployed and using tears to do laundry.
(A quick side note: why does every promotional shot of a protagonist have to look like they’re posing for a sombre album cover? Alphen, from Tales of Arise, is seen here pondering his complete lack of personality.)
Don’t get me wrong, you have to make the character say what the player is thinking. For as much as I love Berseria, the next game in the franchise Arise got it hilariously wrong. I’m spoiling the game now but I also don’t care: the lead character Alphen ends the story by giving a big ‘I’m the good guy, hurr dee derr, you did bad’ speech to the villain. It goes on forever, to the point the villain takes the big important world-saving item and leaves. Sometimes humans want vengeance, not a speech. Arise was alienating. They also resolved it in a way that felt like a top-level satirist taking a swipe at JRPGs, I laughed before the crushing disappointment of what the series had done kicked in. The aforementioned Cold Steel 2 also does it towards the end.
I hope gaming continues to frame things differently. Techniques like unreliable narrators and morally questionable protagonists hit hard when done right or the writers are bold enough to do an honest, thorough examination of a trope.
Now, all of this is opinion, obviously, but I think Yuji Horii was right. Silent protagonists are a thing of the past. Advancing technology has made the cons far outweigh the pros unless its a game designed around an overarching story and either little dialogue.
Yet just because they can’t be silent, it doesn’t mean that framing device has to be retired.
Gaming, like life, thrives on variety, so as long as writers and developers are willing to fully commit, explore ideas thoroughly and try new things, then gaming should stay in a healthy place.
