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Badly written characters who were successfully redeemed in later games
- Thread starter Weiss
- Start date
I think there was more nuance to him with how he was in the third semester while still being a murderer
Nathan Hale spoke a little bit in 1, a lot more in 2 where he was somewhat of an actual character but I wouldn't call him really notable or impressionable compared to Capelli in 3.
Hale was basically a Freeman type, but I think (it's been a stretch) they gave him a bit more character in 2.
On the other hand, Capelli was kind of a dickbag in R2, then turned into a much more compelling character for R3.
Corrin from Fire Emblem Fates is a hopelessly naive character who tries to see the best in people despite being in a story that kind of outlook simply isn't compatible with. She comes off as a badly written fool in her own game. Especially in Conquest.
Corrin from Fire Emblem Warriors is a hopelessly naive character with a gentle disposition and is an allround pleasant character. Same goes for every Fates character there, but Corrin benefits the most. The Hoshido and Nohr conflict is brought to a hold in the main story in a way that makes sense. (We're stuck in another world where there is no Hoshido or Nohr, maybe we should stick together and help the locals?) Then the game has a history map where The Coice of Fire Emblem Fates is remade, and it pulls it off better than actual Fates. ...then it does it again in the hidden Anna map that condenses an entire history map into one battle.
Fire Emblem Warriors took Corrin from being one of the weakest main characters in Fire Emblem to actually being a fun and interesting character. Same for all of the sibling characters.
Corrin from Fire Emblem Warriors is a hopelessly naive character with a gentle disposition and is an allround pleasant character. Same goes for every Fates character there, but Corrin benefits the most. The Hoshido and Nohr conflict is brought to a hold in the main story in a way that makes sense. (We're stuck in another world where there is no Hoshido or Nohr, maybe we should stick together and help the locals?) Then the game has a history map where The Coice of Fire Emblem Fates is remade, and it pulls it off better than actual Fates. ...then it does it again in the hidden Anna map that condenses an entire history map into one battle.
Fire Emblem Warriors took Corrin from being one of the weakest main characters in Fire Emblem to actually being a fun and interesting character. Same for all of the sibling characters.
Yeah, FEW really does a lot to redeem the Fates characters that appear, and Corrin in particular. It doesn't rescue Fates itself, but it manages to make Corrin and the Nohr and Hoshido siblings all feel entertaining and compelling, whether that be Corrin's naivety coming off better or the way that the Nohrian characters present as the "evil" side in an entertaining way despite not being evil themselves.
From a character deliberately written to be the antithesis of the macho badass power fantasy to... exactly that? I mean I like MGR Raiden but I dunno that you an even really call him the same character anymore.
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I think it's true that MGS4 feels like it was as a betrayal of everything Raiden was meant to be, but I think MGR, despite seemingly leaning even harder into that idea by making him a motorcycle riding cyborg samurai vigilante with a talking robot dog, was also, broadly speaking, a story about Raiden completely fucking his life up because he'll never be able to live peacefully.
Yeah he becomes really badass and fights a cyborg republican and his giant mechanical spider and has RIPPER MODE, but he also completely abandons any semblance of normalcy so he can go off and be Batman.
Gotta say FFXIV. They made Elidibus from a boring villain with like no presence to a compelling one in one patch. Emet was great too but he basically wasn't even in the past expansion and cameos more than anything else.
Also Baten Kaito Origins which turned the main villain from a generic ancient sealed evil into this Faustian tragedy victim.
Also Baten Kaito Origins which turned the main villain from a generic ancient sealed evil into this Faustian tragedy victim.
I don't know. All I could think while playing Rising was that Raiden had gotten way too over the top, even for Metal Gear's melodramatic nature. It feels like Rising would have worked better from a story perspective if it were a Gray Fox game.
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I see the impetus behind a Raiden game post-MGS4 (so against the original plan of Metal Gear Solid: Rising, which was going to explain the timeskip between MGS2 and 4) being that any continuation of Raiden after MGS4 would inevitably have to involve him doing the things he was supposed to have overcome in MGS4. If Raiden's going to be the hero of his own game then that requires walking back on his resolution and reunion with his wife and son.
So MGR goes forward with this using two ideas. The first is that the day is saved but Raiden needs a job, and he's a trauma ridden killer cyborg so he can't just become a telemarketer. The only thing Raiden has ever been good at in his life is killing people, so he signs up with a "nice" PMC who fights in nice wars for good reasons, and Raiden tells himself that he is fighting for the ideal of justice because Raiden absolutely wishes his life were an anime.
Then Raiden goes through a harrowing moment where he jacks into the brains of some enemy cyborgs and learns that all the people he's been cutting down the entire game in elaborate pre-animated takedowns and eating their spines for nourishment aren't just evil jerks who became cyborgs for the hell of it. None of them chose it in the sense of it being something they could live without, they are the poor and sick and desperate who signed up with the evil child abducting cyborg plan because if they didn't they starve to death on the street. Nobody would actually choose to do this to themselves.
After this Raiden faces off against
So then Raiden slaughters his way through the rest of the game and learns to fight for what he believes in from Sam and Armstrong, and what he believes in is finding people who fit his criteria for evil and slicing them open with a katana. He abandons his family and wages a crusade against vague platitudes because it's literally all he can do.
It's hard to say how this would have played out in any follow up, but I like to think in MGR2 Raiden would have eventually learned Rosemary had found a new husband like she did with Colonel Campbell in MGS4, but instead of it being a clever ruse it actually was just that Rosemary divorced him because he quit his job to go be a samurai.
I think in this case, it just leaves a bad taste because that theoretical Rising 2 will never happen, so you have Raiden embracing the cartoon psychopath within and he goes off to kill more people and...that's all his character arc will ever amount to now. Had the game stuck to the original plan of exploring the time gap from MGS2 to 4, it might have resulted in a better arc in at least demonstrating how he got from A to B, and also touch on things that were just one-line easter eggs in MGS4 ("Madnar...") As it stands, it feels like the Rising we got was more or less Platinum taking Raiden and doing something with him completely untethered from the world and events that previously drove his characterization in the first place.
I feel like Layla Hassan from the last AC trilogy first here.
In Origins she was *strong female character* (tm), then was completely butchered in Odyssey as a walking marionette with no human feelings even when doing the grossest of deeds.
Then came Valhalla and gave us punished Layla:
In this game they took the character flaws from the past games and turned them into either plot points or personality quirks, and also gave a good, impacting, satisfying conclusion to her arc both in itself and in terms of the franchise.
Definetly redeemed imo.
In Origins she was *strong female character* (tm), then was completely butchered in Odyssey as a walking marionette with no human feelings even when doing the grossest of deeds.
Then came Valhalla and gave us punished Layla:
In this game they took the character flaws from the past games and turned them into either plot points or personality quirks, and also gave a good, impacting, satisfying conclusion to her arc both in itself and in terms of the franchise.
Definetly redeemed imo.
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I feel that the ultimate message of MGR is "work with what you've got" and that's something neither Raiden or Armstrong really learned. Raiden starts the game trying to do this before succumbing and Armstrong decided he, a fabulously wealthy Republican who played college ball, can be the instrument of global societal upheaval and realize his dream of social Darwinism because too many people are obsessed with social media or whatever. Armstrong treats Raiden as the ultimate proof of his goal's nobility, that Raiden lost everything and fought tooth and nail to survive, even though Armstrong himself has never really suffered any indignity in his life. Armstrong could enact some kind of positive change using his political power but instead he invested in cyborg orphan brain harvesting. Raiden ends the game going off to hunt and kill without any kind of oversight and after everything that happens I don't think the game intended to make him look cool for doing it.
Part of the game's ending is finding out all the child cyborg brains have been recovered by Raiden's PMC, and because those kids are by and large orphans from horrible circumstances you can't really just drop them off with a smile and wave, so they decide to recruit them. The kids get an education, new bodies to replace the ones taken from them, and eventually they'll have a job. Literally nobody in any good conscious could consider this a satisfying conclusion, and it isn't. Everyone involved would rather there be a circumstance where these kids can go back to their normal lives but as far as the ending of the game is concerned it is outside the power of anyone who cares, and the scene notes it as an imperfect solution for an imperfect world.
I am maybe putting too much hope in a hypothetical, impossible video game, but I do feel MGR was setting up for some kind of ultimate character growth for Raiden. Metal Gear Rising walked back his happy ending in MGS4 in a way that made in-canon sense but was perhaps unsatisfactory to longtime fans (like it's probably not a coincidence that the ending gives Raiden an artificial body that lets him hug his wife and son that then seemingly disappears so he can look like an edgy can opener) in the hopes of building him to new heights, but that game was never made so all we're left with is Raiden falling into his worst aspects and a whiff of what could have been.
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Serious questiom: does anyone really consider MGR canon? The story is not good and the way Raiden is treated is borderline character assassination, but I don't mind that much since I don't see any of it as canon.
Oh and my other example would be the entire Infamous series going from the first game to the second, but in particular with how it changes Cole from a man with a gravel dispenser for a voice into a more chilled out guy trying his best against overwhelming odds, and Zeke from the fat comedy sidekick who betrays you for no reason into someone who trains to become an engineering genius/tactical mastermind who throws himself into the fray because he knows how badly he once messed up and never wants to let Cole down again.
"Look, I don't call you 'brother' just because I like the way it sounds."
Zeke has one of the strongest redemption arcs I've ever seen in a game series, though I wouldn't call him badly written in Infamous 1.
He was a selfish and jealous dickhead in the first game on purpose.
Riku from kingdom hearts
I like god of war 18 alot but kratos still ain't deeper than a pool
I like god of war 18 alot but kratos still ain't deeper than a pool
Solid Snake from the MGS series. He's a generic FBI agent in the first 2 games but we finally get to see his vulnerable and human side in MGSV.
I didn't do a lot of the extra maps in FEW and not gonna lie, this is making me want to go back and do so.
I've seen someone else make this argument word for word, but I don't agree.
You can clearly tell the brothers have got huge love and respect for each other in second son. Just as much as Zeke and Cole
I agree. Rising feels like fan fiction to me, and I have not used that term for any other game ever because it is usually extreme hyperbole and usually means that someone just didn't personally like the game.
Rising feels like it goes against Raiden's past character arcs and betrays everything he learned and grew from in the past games. I like that game a lot but I truly wish they stuck with the original plan of it taking place between 2 and 4. I still want to see that story...
I mean sure, but compared to GoW1-2-3... lol, it's night and dayRiku from kingdom hearts
I like god of war 18 alot but kratos still ain't deeper than a pool
I like god of war 18 alot but kratos still ain't deeper than a pool
As someone who played through 1-2-3 recently, omg yes
Kratos himself is pretty bad as a character, but more importantly the storytelling sucks because the only way they can keep you interested in Kratos is by having everyone around him be shallow cartoon caricatures. Greek-Era Kratos only works (if he works at all) because he's literally the only actual character in the game.
GoW2018 elevates itself not just by fully exploring Kratos or even him and Atreus but allowing full characters arcs for Brok and Sindri and offering a sympathetic angle to Baldur. Jury's kind of still out how Freya is gonna turn out since they kind of had her character arc be a cliffhanger for the next game and we still have badly written characters like Magni and Modi, but yeah, compared to the shitfire that is the original GoW's, yes.
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Serah from Final Fantasy XIII was so boring and generically sweet and lacked almost all agency in that game (the latter made sense plot-wise at least, but eh), but I ended up loving her in XIII-2 when she became the main character. She was strong, but in a different way from her sister, and she had a little fire to her that wasn't seen at all in XIII.
Knew Raiden would be in this thread the moment I saw the title, but that's a legitimate downgrade for me honestly. I think Raiden was great in 2 and I especially liked him 4, but MGR didn't do it for me at all in regards to him as a character. Can't even really explain why.
Gaius van Baelsar from FFXIV goes from being comically evil armor gunblade man ranting about how power gives him the right to rule to an actual nuanced character who bears the burden of the destruction and suffering caused by his blind hubris. Emet-Selch and Elidibus turned out to be great villains, but in a weird way, current Gaius actually benefits as a character from how poorly written he was in ARR.
Why do people conflate likability with whether a character is "well written" or not? A character can be a "well written" fuckwad jerk or a boring, cliche goody two shoes. Whether a character is "well written" or not has more to do with originality and their utility in the narrative than it has to do with how "empathetic" they are.
Not to say that empathy can't be utilized as an effective story telling device, but it seems like a whole generation of kids have been brought up to believe the only valid approach to writing.
Not to say that empathy can't be utilized as an effective story telling device, but it seems like a whole generation of kids have been brought up to believe the only valid approach to writing.
He really wasn't that bad of a character. He just wasn't Snake.
Yep. This.
MGS2's Raiden is the best version of the character. Rising's version is terrible and it completely misses his character development during the series and the great ending he got on MGS4.
Yeah I agree with this. I mean Grey Fox was somewhat of an anti-hero considering the circumstances of him teaming up with Big Boss in Metal Gear 2 being dissatisfied with his former superiors. Seeing at the timing of MGR he was already a Cyborg, I'd like to say it would make more sense to focus on his character in that game as opposed to what they did with Raiden by regressing his character growth and losing most of his humanity by turning him into a killing machine, especially when it contrasts with his background history with Rose and John in wanting to have a normal family, by Raiden being converted into a machine basically ruined all of this.
It's the antithesis of this entire thread. He was a decently written character and written for the worse in subsequent games. There is no redemption being made or implied at all in this case.
Garrus Vakarian is kinda boring in Mass Effect 1. He doesn't become Shepard's best bro/boyfriend everyone loves until 2.