SpaceMedarotterX said:
How the fuck can I be nostalgic about a game I played a month ago? And no, it has nothing to do with how hard it is to get to KNOW a character, it has to do with how that character is, how you interact with them, how they tie into you.
So enlighten me then, why are the characters in Planescape: Torment so good? As mentioned, two are simply archetypes of the D&D Law/Chaos alignment system.
I'll admit that since every RPG seems to need a wisecracker character Morte was one of the least offensive, but beyond that I don't really see anything truly sparkling.
True, there were some excellent minor characters too, I'm just not seeing the order of magnitude here.
SpaceMedarotterX said:
And I love how you can state "Well DA2's characters are good" while utterly failing to provide any argument as to WHY they are good, while I have stated, again and again, why they are terrible wastes of space.
You've provided one rant. I'd hardly call that 'again and again'.
Your complaint about Anders comes down to 'but he's
different! from how he is in Awakening'. As I've said, being different from an emotionally dead wisecracker with ADD is not necessarily a bad thing. People can rewrite their own intellectual property, they aren't being cruel to their own fictional creations by doing so.
I romanced Anders, I enjoyed it too. It felt like the least worst option in some ways, but it made sense and actually had some emotional teeth once act 3 kicked in. If you take liking a character as wanting to go and have a drink with them, then I didn't, but I think there's more to it than that.
I would talk about Merrill but.. hang on.. Morrigan as a
positive example? I get that she almost had her ridiculously shaped tits out and that holds appeal with some people, but she is a two dimensional archetype so transparent and laughable that it actually makes no sense. She advises every single 'evil' choice, even when it's entirely nonsensical or inconsistent.
* She claims to hate religion, but advises you to side with Kolgrim when he's standing around ranting crazily about Andraste (and no, she doesn't know he's a dragon cultist).
* She claims the chantry are zealots, but then wants to side with the Templars to destroy the mages because, despite being in a state of rebellion at that very moment, they're apparently slaves who don't deserve to live.
* Despite this, she advises you to free Jowan, despite him being the whiniest most self loathing little peon in human history and openly explaining that he's a blood mage.
Also, her romance fucking irritated me, because despite supposedly being strong and confident and sexually liberated it takes her all of 10 minutes to fall in love with the warden simply because he puts his nob in her.
And this is good writing?
Merrill comes across as incredibly stupid, I'll give you that. However, I get the feeling she's kind of meant to, I merely suspect someone overdid it when they were writing her dialogue. As far as I'm concerned though, she could be a dog throwing up in a bucket and she would still have more motive for her actions than Morrigan.
Aveline and Varric are actually really good.. the former in particular is literally the most well-executed 'butch/masculated' female character I can remember seeing in a game and managed rather beautifully to step around all the generic 'tomboy' cliches. That's worth something.
Fenris I'm with you on. The same goes for Isabella, who seems to have become a living receptacle for the soulless vacuum which inhabited Anders in Awakening.
However.. the Hawke twins.. seriously, I can't believe how many people seem to have written them off. How often do supporting characters get a genuine character arc, as opposed to simply a series of optional dialogues or a side quest, and you just dismissed them because they act too much like real people and that makes them boring?
Minor spoilers might come out here.
I'm less impressed by Bethany, I'll admit, because she's a little 'cute', but her arc is still pretty much perfect. She's your younger sister, she looks up to you to protect her, and pretty much whatever option you take you fail in that regard. Precisely how bitter she is depends on your relationship with her, but regardless, she takes it pretty badly. Assuming she survives, she is then forced to become a much stronger and more independent person, until by the very end she makes her own choices and treats you much more as an equal. Simple. Beautiful. Makes total sense with how her character is established.
Carver is fucking great. I'll come out and say that now. Yes, he doesn't like you, he is extremely jealous of you. Being an older sibling IRL is not always a very harmonious place to be. As with Bethany, however, it is theoretically possible to change that relationship over the course of act 1, and it does have consequences.
Like Bethany, Carver is extremely immature at the beginning of the game. He's morally weak, he's desperate for acceptance and actually he's a bit of a coward, his realization of his own impending death is a far cry from the normal 'go on without me' or gallows humour bollocks which seems to characterize every other Bioware character in a life or death situation, and thus is actually convincing. It's how a real person might act in that situation.
Also like Bethany, Carver grows enormously by the end of the game and ultimately overcomes these flaws - it's a little sudden, especially if the take the full rivalry path, but it nonetheless makes a great deal of sense.
This is character development. It's fairly simple character development rendered in broad strokes, but still better than just about any RPG character who simply exists as a soulless extension of the players will, i.e. most of them.
