I think we can fairly say that our society has a Mary Sue problem.
I’m not going to say that this is something new, really, but it’s a noticeable trend in popular literature today. Over-powered characters made for blatant wish fulfillment is kind of a thing in fiction. However, I think that something we often fail to notice is that Sues are not just limited to our books and movies.
Yes, I’m talking about video games.
On the one hand, this is understandable—people want the interactive medium of story-telling to cater to their wish fulfillment. In short, you want to play a badass, you want to feel like a badass, and if you want to make a successful video game franchise you often have to make a character who continually overcomes overwhelming odds in order to make the player invested and give them both satisfaction and a challenge.
But that doesn’t mean that characters shouldn’t have distinct personalities or limitations, and their great feats have to be justified by the world they’re living in. Take Assassin’s Creed —Desmond quickly picking up fighting skills is explained by his living through the memories of his ancestors, who often found themselves in combat situations. Is this realistic? Hell no. Does it work within the parameters that the game has set? Yes.
Enter Kratos from God of War.
God of War is perhaps one of the weirdest things for me, in that I continually bash it for its abuse of mythology and I still pay attention to the narrative, but I never really bought the games because I’m a cheap bastard like that. When I first heard that there was a mainstream video game series based on Greek mythology, I got pretty excited, until I found out that it was essentially a gore fest with boobs sprinkled here and there for fanservice.
“But Juracan!” I can hear someone saying, “Greek mythology had sex and gruesome violence in it. You weren’t honestly expecting anything like the Disney movie, were you?”
First: don’t you dare mention that travesty in a conversation about mythology, ever. Second: yes, there was plenty of sex and violence in Greek mythology. But there’s a huge difference between a story saying, “Theseus cut off the Minotaur’s head,” and showing Kratos repeatedly and angrily impaling Theseus and viciously slamming a stone door on the guy’s head while fountains of blood spewed across the screen.
Why is Kratos brutally killing Theseus? Simple: because Kratos is a Mary Sue. Or Gary Stu. Whatever, you know what I mean.
Now, this is an examination based on narrative, not gameplay. So no, this isn’t a review of the series, nor am I condemning the games in that or any other regard.
Nor is this an essay about all of the mythology the games get wrong. Yes, I may mention it here or there if it’s related to the point, but if we were to list everything that’s wrong with the mythology in the games, we’d be here all day. I mean, I could do that, and from what I know of her, Pyrotra might stick around for some good mythological discussion, but I’m not sure you other guys and gals out there care.
So let’s look at Kratos’s life, shall we? Kratos is a Spartan captain who makes a deal with Ares, the Greek god of war, to save his own life and kick all kinds of ass across the known world as the deity’s champion. He is forced to kill his wife and children in a fit of madness by Ares, and in retaliation he severs ties with the god of war, and is haunted by nightmares of killing his family. The other gods realize that Ares is getting out of control and conquering the world…
…so they decide someone’s got to take him down. Zeus has forbidden divine intervention for… reasons… so Kratos is chosen to destroy Ares by using the power locked inside of Pandora’s Box. Long story short, he kills Ares, but his nightmares don’t leave and he decides to kill himself. Athena saves him, though, and gives him the now-vacant throne of the god of war on Olympus as a consolation prize. The narrator exposits that remains the god of war throughout human history.
…Until the next game, where we find out Kratos has become just like Ares and refuses to heed Athena’s warning to stop killing everything. Zeus takes away his godhood and kills him, but Gaea saves him from Tartarus and tells him to go to the Fates to change his past. Kratos does so, the Fates refuse, he kills them, and he goes back to declare war on Zeus, bringing the Titans with him which leads into the third game where Kratos kills everything that’s left, including himself.
Okay, a vast oversimplification, and I’m not even getting into the unnumbered games yet, but that’s the gist of it.
Now look at the story for the first game: that’s a solid story. He gets wronged, and is given a chance for vengeance and redemption. It’s a nice arc, and is mainly self-contained. Kratos is mostly a sympathetic character, and we understand where he’s coming from and why he wants to get there.
We do run into some issues in the details, of course, that come up if you think about it for five seconds. Kratos gets killed but fights his way out of the Underworld. How come nobody else does this? Why doesn’t Ares just do this after he gets killed? Ares gave Kratos his power, why doesn’t he just take it away?
The problems start rolling in full force during the second game with Kratos killing the Fates. I’m sorry, no. If it had been established that the Fates don’t actually decide people’s… well, fates, then I might buy this. Like, in Asura’s Wrath, we see Asura fight and win against Chakravartin, an incredibly powerful creature that claims to be the Creator. The thing is we only have his word for it—we’ve never seen if Chakravartin actually created the world, or if he is just taking credit for it. So when Asura beats a super-powerful being who claims to be God, then we can kind of buy it.
But the Fates predict all that happens on Kratos’s journey to see them, everything that happened in the past, and even having a mural in their temple foreseeing three figures following a star through the desert. There’s no reason given for why Kratos can kill them. This shouldn’t be a fight—the Fates would just say Kratos dies and he does. But like every antagonist of the series, they decide to keep a firm grasp of the Idiot Ball and get into a duel with the former god of war.
The narrative falls apart in the third volume, when we see that Kratos kills several major Olympians, causing world disasters. After ripping off the head of Helios with his bare hands, the sky goes black. After beating Poseidon to a bloody pulp, gouging his eyes out and chucking him off of Mount Olympus, the world floods. When Hermes dies, a plague of insects swarm upon the hapless Earth. Does Kratos comment or worry about any of this? Nope! But at the end, Kratos kills himself and releases the power inside him, Hope, unto the world, giving it to mortals.
…what the hell.
This is Mary Sue fiction at its purest, guys. It’s a character, inserted into an already established world, who kicks everyone’s ass six ways to Sunday and in the end is supposed to be good because… reasons. Despite mourning his wife and children’s murder, Kratos has sex with Aphrodite, and is shown to apparently get orgies going at brothels just by showing up. And hell, we’re not even going into the inconsistencies. He kills the Fates and controls their loom, so he can change time, and it’s obvious that the past can be changed, because the Fates threaten to change the past so he loses to Ares. But when Kratos goes and stops Zeus from killing him… shouldn’t he not be there by virtue of re-writing history? And then he keeps coming back from the Underworld, except when any other god does it, they appear as Force ghost things but Kratos doesn’t because he’s the protagonist?
I can’t emphasize how overpowered and ridiculous this character is! Even the Winchesters need help to climb out of the afterlife every other season, but Kratos does it by Protagonist Power alone. He kills Thanatos, the personification of Death! He is the center of a prophecy regarding the end of the gods (so much for defying the Fates…)! He punches Heracles to death! He fights and kills Zeus, the king of the gods (who also happens to be his father)! And regularly has sex with multiple women (while mourning the death of his family)!
And what pisses me off is that because at the end he gives Hope to the world or something he’s supposed to be a hero. Never mind that he never actually does anything good solely for someone else’s sake in the entire run of his story, mercilessly slaughtering people who aren’t even posing a threat to him without a moment of remorse. Never mind that he never takes an opportunity to help the people around him that are in danger when he has every opportunity to. Never mind that his emotional state is mainly pure unfiltered rage and screaming, and that he doesn’t develop as a character at all throughout the entire story other than being given something else to get angry about. We’re supposed to like this asshole and think that he made the world a better place.
I feel like so much of his actions are supposed to be incredibly badass, but it all just sounds ridiculous. I mean look at it—it’s laughable. Robert E. Howard’s Conan isn’t that over-the-top in manliness, and that guy’s a walking testosterone factory! At least Conan has a code of honor and friends, neither of which Kratos even understands. Kratos isn’t a character, guys, he’s a sixth grader’s idea of manliness. And I feel like no one actually calls Sony on it, because it’s a video game and it’s not supposed to have a good story or something.
Well, screw that. I am, right now. Aside from being a mostly solid character in the first game, Kratos is perhaps one of the biggest Sues I have ever seen in the history of fiction, which given the rise of teen paranormal romance in popular culture, is saying something. The guy’s a hate-ridden douchenozzle that’s only successful because the plot says he is. I’m not saying there can’t be protagonists who are overly powerful or violent or vengeful, but don’t do all three and then expect me to take it at face value that he’s a good guy because he’s the protagonist.
Mingnon on 16 March 2013, 02:19 said:
I agree that Kratos is an awful protagonist… nay, character in a rather gratuitous game series. It seems the only reason this series has continued to this day is the same reason there continues to be various FPS games, or blantant fanservice, or any other ultra-violent game, or just about any other tired-out video game trend; because there is a staggeringly massive market for this.
However, the somewhat decent Kratos was created by GoW’s original creators, who planned to have a trilogy, but it seemed they had left Sony. So Sony decided to act on the trilogy in their own way, thus this mess.
But then again, I didn’t really care at the time the first game came out; I thought it was just another cash-in on gory man fantasies.
go.a on 16 March 2013, 03:20 said:
Uh, fuck you. Disney’s Hercules is awesome.
That said, every video game protagonist is an OP Mary Sue. It’s basically an inherent feature of the medium that has always existed and will continue to exist. People want to be the best and coolest character and the easiest way to achieve that is to steamroll over all the NPCs. Take the newest Fire Emblem game, which has a My Unit character that’s basically a self insert of the player. The MU can access every class and skill (excluding some opposite gender classes/skills), marry any of the opposite gender characters (and pass on great skills/stats to the children), has ridiculously good stats and is a central plot character.
Book on the other hand don’t have the same excuse which is why people are more critical when they stumble onto an author’s pet/Mary Sue.
Juracan on 16 March 2013, 05:05 said:
Uh, uncalled for, much? My mention of Hercules was a joke. I don’t actually hate that movie at all. I still think it doesn’t have much place in a serious discussion about Greek mythology, but I by no means hate it.
Er… no, I can’t agree with you there. I can’t speak about Fire Emblem, having no experience with it, but I know that in terms of RPGs there’s a huge difference. The character in an RPG is supposed to be a self-insert, and supposed to be customizable in certain ways; the same appears to be for the customizable unit you’re referring to in Fire Emblem. Kratos is not like that. He’s a distinct character in a pre-set storyline and backstory. There’s making your own personal character a badass, yes, and then there’s the developers making it nonsensical by creating a protagonist who’s a walking pantheocide who can never be beaten.
The problem isn’t just that Kratos is ludicrously over-powered, though. It’s that along with being over-powered, he’s a complete hate-ridden douchewad, and we’re supposed to sympathize with him and not notice how unlikeable he is. And you certainly can have characters who are incredibly powerful or constantly beat the insurmountable odds in other forms of media and story-telling, like Dream from The Sandman or Kvothe from The Kingkiller Chronicles, and yet still avoid them being Sues by virtue of presenting their flaws in a way that’s visible to the reader and makes you sympathize with their plights.
Kratos is not like that. Not in the slightest. Yes, we see his flaws, but the only ones who call him out on them in the story are enemies that he kills shortly after. At the end of the story, his vengeance is never seen as anything terrible. He doesn’t even feel guilty about, you know, unleashing Armageddon on an unsuspecting world, something that was actually his fault instead of the time he killed his family.
Taku on 16 March 2013, 05:49 said:
Definitely uncalled for. Please try to be respectful. First, as fun a movie as it is, Disney’s Hercules cannot make any claims toward scholarly significance or historical accuracy. Therefore, Juracan’s claims that it does not belong in serious discussions of mythology is correct. Second, if you are going to attack anything, attack the author’s arguments, not the author. Personal and ad hominem attacks are generally not tolerated. Try to prove that what they said is wrong, don’t just say “fuck you, you’re wrong.” I like to think of ImpishIdea as a bastion of critical thought and rational argument, not the Youtubes comments section.
I disagree. In Baldur’s Gate, your character starts off weak and gradually gains hard-won skills over time. Even at the end, they are far from the most powerful character. The sequel has the same focus, with the addition that other characters can disagree with your decisions, and even come to hate you for them. In The Elder Scrolls series, you start most games owning nothing and knowing nothing; it is only by a great deal of hard work do you gain any sort of significant ability or power. In the third game, Morrowind, not only do you start out knowing and owning nothing, but you are despised by the entire native population as an ‘outlander’, as well as by the very first characters you meet, because you are a presumed criminal.
There are many games like this. I would argue that the ‘start weak, work up to strength’ model is far more popular than the ‘start super-strong, kill everything with little resistance’ model. Because the second is unrealistic and boring, and offers the player no challenge and nothing to work towards.
sakuuya on 16 March 2013, 08:48 said:
This article’s kind of unfocused at the beginning. How violent the GOW games are, for instance, has nothing to do with Kratos being a Sue or not—if the games only had bloodless PG-13 violence, or if most deaths happened offscreen, his character would still be essentially the same. How badly the series handles Greek mythology is likewise irrelevant. If this article was a game review or a more general critique of the series, those might be valid point.
But including those things in an article where they don’t reinforce the main point makes the tone of this piece less “Let me tell you why this is bad character writing” and more “Let me tell you how much I hate these games.” I know you weren’t trying to give that impression, so I suggest that you leave off-topic criticism out of future articles. In particular, starting off with the off-topic stuff weakens your main argument because by the time you got to the meat, I was thinking, “Well, maybe he just thinks Kratos is a Sue because of his general mad-on for GOW.” The meat (the delicious, delicious Sue meat) was well done (heh), but I think it would’ve been tastier if it had been presented undiluted by the sauce of your other issues with the series. Wow, that metaphor really got away from me. Sorry.
I also wish you had spent more time talking about Sueism generally. “Mary Sue” has become a catch-all term for “character the writer doesn’t like,” and while, again, I think you make a good case for Kratos, it would have been helpful to devote some time at the start to delineating what exactly qualifies a character for Sue-dom in your eyes. Is it being overpowered in comparison to xir world? The moral dissonance of an asshole character being held up as heroic? Conforming to a really dumb definition of coolness? Something that didn’t come up this time? Some combination thereof?
For me personally (and I respect that your definition may not include these specific things), the two things that make a character automatically Sueish are (1) Xir perception is identical to reality, and (2) The world around xir reacts in a way that xir actions don’t merit—your asshole-hailed-as-hero thing, basically. In this case, I’m particularly curious about the second one: You alluded to it being a problem, what with the grateful whores and all, but how much do the games treat him as a heroic character, rather than just the violent dick that the player happens to be controlling? I just watched the ending of GOW3, and I didn’t get the impression that I was supposed to like him for giving Hope to humanity, since he doesn’t do it for a good reason (or, like…any reason I could figure out), and all the terrible stuff that happens in that game is his own damn fault anyway.
Am I misreading that? I’m not too familiar with the series as a whole. How do people normally react when he does something obviously awful (“Oh, whoops, I guess I killed all the plants!”)? Are there any characters in this series who are non-assholish enough that their opinion even counts for this purpose? I mean, if a character’s reaction is based on how Kratos’ actions support or undermine their own nefarious plans—which seems to be Athena’s deal, from what I saw—it’s hard to use that character as a barometer, whereas something like the way all the normal high schoolers in Twilight fawn over Bella despite her never being nice or cool or interesting shows that the universe at large supports her bullshit.
Tim on 16 March 2013, 10:45 said:
I don’t think you played the same GoW3 I did, because I distinctly recall the game shows him fucking up the entire world and not caring in the slightest. He feels bad about killing Hephaestus and tries to make amends (and fails). As he said of Pandora:
“She died because of my need for vengeance.”
He opened Pandora’s Box. Having to kill the Gods was his fault. He failed at everything he tried to do and after he kills Zeus he’s left looking at the hell on Earth that he created. His only option is to kill himself to stop things from getting even worse. 3 is under no illusions about the lead; Kratos is a total dick who’s lost sight of everything except his need to kill Zeus.
I get from your using “douchenozzle” that you watch Yahtzee. I suggest you stop, he’s given to ridiculous oversimplifications, can’t empathise with any character who isn’t in some way pathetic, and reviews games he’s barely played and doesn’t really know anything about.
Lillian on 16 March 2013, 13:45 said:
Interesting topic and discussion . . . I haven’t played GOW3, so I don’t feel qualified to make judgments about it. However, I think there’s definitely a risk for player characters in video games to have the potential to be Sueish, because most video games are by nature wish-fulfillment. In games where the protagonist is pre-defined, you have less control over this, but in RPG’s where you make your own character and have some control over their choices and actions (like the marvelous Baldur’s Gate) it’s really up to you.
As for “Sue” = “character I don’t like,” I think there is some subjectivity at work to an extent. But I’ve always thought of Sues being characters that are in some way not believable; for example, if Bella in Twilight retained her grating personality but everyone didn’t love her for it, I would be easier on her as a character. It’s the way other characters revolve around her and treat her like a saint that makes her a Sue IMO. However, I also find certain characters Sueish that others don’t necessarily seem to, like the aforementioned Kvothe from “The Name of the Wind,” who is a fairly developed character but still unbelievable to me (I’m also biased because I can’t stand him).
go.a on 16 March 2013, 18:03 said:
Okay, unclench your panties people, I was joking about the Herc line. I realize it totally mangles mythology, but it’s still a fun little movie with catchy songs-which is all it ever should be viewed as. If you want a serious discussion about mythology don’t bring in Disney.
@Juracan:
Whether you’re talking about an RPG character or a distinct pre-set character, they’ll both end up dominating. Doesn’t matter if the player is an empty husk like Master Chief or a story-set character like the Prince of Persia. This isn’t even a point of argument. The MC will be the best, do impossible things and the plot (and to an extent the world) will largely revolve around them. That seems pretty Mary Sueish to me.
People accept and expect the above to happen. Nobody wants to be fodder NPC farmer #7.
Will the game call them out on douchy behavior is another question altogether. Unfortunately, in a lot of cases it won’t, or it’ll be brushed aside quickly because players don’t like dealing with those sort of things (i.e. the mountain of enemy corpses you leave behind). Or the designers will throw in a morality system and call it a day.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see more games call out awful MCs but I’m not going to hold my breath.
@Taku:
You start off weak in every game, that’s not the point. My point is that by the end you’ll have heaped on the best skills, attacks, weapons etc. so that you’ll be raping your way through everything regardless of how shitty you were at the start. It’s guaranteed that you’ll face off against that dark god/demon/alien/whatever at the end and save the world.
Dumb morality systems don’t mean anything either. Take the Infamous games, where the morality system is in full effect but has no impact on the power level of the protagonist. Usually being evil or good means that there’s branching skills or attacks, and evil will like 9/10 of the time end up with better/cooler attributes.
And if a few NPCs hate the player’s character, so what? Not like they’ll matter down the line. Most games are set in such a way as to allow the player to still be OP, whether he’s a saintly do-gooder or a total dick. The world caters to the MC because the player is the only one that really matters.
Player controlled characters will be Suish, that’s just how it is.
Tim on 16 March 2013, 18:26 said:
Oh yeah, I really got the sense that Ramirez from MW2 was the best rather than just a faceless extension of Foley’s will. Usually in modern FPSes the plot doesn’t revolve around you at all, it revolves around the guy who tells you want to do because you’re a silent nonentity who’s incapable of doing anything you haven’t been ordered to.
The best games don’t make the player feel useless or overpowered, because when you feel overpowered you started getting into the Mr. Incredible bit where you question what the point of saving these people is when they’re all hopeless basket cases anyway. I always preferred games like Resistance: Fall of Man and Space Marine where your guy makes the difference but before you showed up everyone was doing their damnedest to win.
No you don’t. Streets of Rage 2 starts you out with full lives, full health and every move you’ll ever have. Most games that do in media res openings start you out with more powers than you have later (eg Prototype). Crysis starts you with all your suit powers, a high-powered assault rifle and a pistol. The Call of Duty games tend to give you a better weapon in the first level than the one you get in the second. Etc.
Making ridiculous generalisations seems to be your thing.
Dude, have you played the game? The good abilities blast the evil ones out of the water in both games. Hell use is “extra collateral damage” compared to “machine gun Bolt that never runs out of ammunition as long as you keep getting hits?”
Stop playing terribly written games or stop oversimplifying game plots, either will do.
Kyllorac on 16 March 2013, 20:57 said:
Depending on how your MU grows, they can wind up either on-par with your top units, or really crappy (this latter happened to my sister). The nice thing about Awakening though is that you have those Second Seals which allow not-so-great units across the board to reach their full potential, and this becomes a necessary technique with the higher difficulty levels.
The classes (some of which are restricted from even the MU), skills, and marriage options are easily accounted for by providing players with choices, which is always a good way to appeal to a broad range of players since not everyone shares play styles. I’m glad the class switching option was carried over from FE12 because I really like being able to switch between classes at will, though unlike FE12, you don’t retain levels when you switch since you’re reverted to the base levels every time you switch. There’s a lot of work involved in making a unit super powered, especially with regards to skill acquisition, regardless of whether it’s the MU or any other unit.
The number of supports and marriage options can also be justified in-story by how Robin is the tactician, and so it’s probable that Robin goes around and talks to everyone in the army on a regular basis to assess combat readiness and such.
My point is, game mechanics-wise, having those options doesn't make the MU overpowered.
With that said, Robin did strike me as being quite Sueish for various story-related reasons, which I won’t mention because spoilers.
Taku on 16 March 2013, 21:12 said:
That just goes to show that it’s not the character that is a Mary Sue, but the player who is acting like one. One of the defining traits of literary MSes is that other characters don’t call them out on their bullshit. If you play any of the Forgotten Realms games as they are intended to be played, you will eventually have a careful balancing act between different NPC personalities, between yourself and even among themselves, all of whom are trying to get your attention or influence your opinions.
So like Tim said, play getter games, or play the games you have as though you actually cared about the story and characters.
Tim on 16 March 2013, 21:35 said:
Hell, you can even have the stupid-powerful character and still not get into Sue / Stu territory if you avoid the bad writing, since not every powerful character is automatically a Sue. A character who does the right thing is not the same thing as a character whose actions are right because they’re the one doing them. Playing as an evil dickhead doesn’t mean you’re supposed to think they’re a wonderful person because they’re the protagonist.
This strikes me more as using a ridiculously overstretched definition of “Mary Sue” to do the “Hercules / Beowulf / whoever was a Sue too so it’s fine that I have one in my Batman x Naruto fanfic” line of BS, which is about as valid as “anything with talking animals in is furry.” Trying to redefine the terms of your opponent’s argument is not an effective debating tactic.
OrganicLead on 17 March 2013, 09:05 said:
Is there anything wrong in having a Gary Stu as a main character in a video game? After all, there is a very different view-character dynamic present in video games than is present in most other media. When someone is being a show off in a movie, that’s the author tipping things towards the character’s favor. But when you’re one hitting enemies without taking damage, there’s a sense of pride and skill.
Another thing to consider is the gameplay. God of War is a Hack and Slash game. This genre tends to be about mowing down big hordes of enemies and feeling awesome doing it. It’s not a genre about depth or studying human nature. That belongs more in the real of pretty much every other genre barring fighters and “casual” games like Angry Birds or Fruit Ninja.
Tim on 17 March 2013, 09:53 said:
Yes. The defining feature of a Sue / Stu is they have a noticeable warping effect on the story. There’s a difference between making the player feel awesome and making the player feel like the rules are being bent for them, especially since you often get the disagreeable feeling that you’re playing as the writer / designer’s self-insert instead of a character you can actually empathise with.
I had that problem in Resistance 2. Hale was a stoic and brave guy in the first one. He’s got this virus and needs some “inhibitor treatment” for it but keeps going to places there’s no reason someone else couldn’t go, and after a while you get the distinct idea he knows that only he is actually allowed to accomplish anything. It makes it impossible to care about his struggles because there’s no good reason he should be struggling at all.
Yeah, but when you’re one-hitting enemies it should be because you’re good at the game. In a game the difficulty is supposed to show how much the character struggles, and if you ace everything it should give you a sense of accomplishment and some idea of how skilled the character is. The two ways games tend to louse this up is either showing the character reacting to a very difficult battle as though it was easy (“fuck you, player character, I just worked my ass off”) or losing in the cutscene following a battle the game made you win (so why was losing before that game over?).
It’s also bad when the player character uses a bunch of moves they don’t have, and when bad guy intros show them one-shotting some poor NPC with an attack that’s a nuisance once the game hands control to you. Meshing gameplay and story is something the industry has steadily got worse at as the ratio of programmers versus failed movie directors in it has narrowed.
OrganicLead on 17 March 2013, 20:57 said:
I haven’t play Resistance 2, so I can’t really comment on that comparison. I kind of missed the point about not all powerful characters being Stus and have to wonder what makes a character a Stu in your book. I was commenting on the assumption that a Stu was a character who is always right, is extremely powerful, has something that makes them special and has a perfect view of the world objectively.
The same can be said for characters not using an ability they have in the game (see the infamous “why didn’t they give Aeris a phoenix down” argument). That’s more a case of internal consistency.
That is a bit of an issue with the main gaming market. It’s also a bit odd because the practice helps in making a character more of a distinct entity from the player, which makes more “Stuish” traits become closer to their traditional media counterparts.
swenson on 17 March 2013, 22:17 said:
I was going to be all “but who cares if videogame characters are Sues, it’s all wish fulfillment anyway” and then I realized that all of my favorite videogame characters… actually aren’t Sues, and they’re still wish fulfillment awesomeness.
I think what’s important is that in the end, no matter how powerful the character gets, they still win because they’re determined and have allies and have made the right choices, not because they’re an unstoppable juggernaut of destruction that cannot possibly be stopped.
Look at, say, Knights of the Old Republic. By the end, you are (spoiler, but it’s a ten-year-old game) literally Revan, one of the most powerful Jedi to ever exist. And you know what? You still need your friends and an entire fleet to take on Darth Malak and his armies. Sure, you can mop the floor with any Dark Jedi and droids you come across. But you still know you can’t take all of them. That’s why you’re trying to find Malak—because if you cut off the head of the snake, you win by default. Otherwise, there’s no real way to stop him.
In virtually all games, it’s true that it’s a given that by the end, virtually nobody “normal” can stop you. But the Big Bad shouldn’t be normal. No matter how tough Commander Shepard is, no matter how many geth colossi you take on single-handedly, you still can’t take a Reaper by yourself. No matter how awesome Revan is, you still can’t defeat everything the Star Forge creates by yourself. No matter how cool your glasses and apparent aphasia are, Gordon Freeman still can’t take on the Combine army on his own. And that’s what matters—that in the end, things still pose threats to you, moral or mental if not physical anymore. And it helps if you can’t do it all on your own.
OrganicLead on 18 March 2013, 06:26 said:
Unless you take the Dark Side path and spend the last level carving through your former crew to take on Malak in a one on one duel.
There’s a place for all sorts of games out there. Bioware has the market cornered in stories of chosen ones who unite a ragtag crew to take on an unstoppable force, Capcom has a tradition of lone heroes beating anything in their path into submission. Both have powerful characters but still make good games.
swenson on 18 March 2013, 10:25 said:
This is a good point; I always play as Light Side (or at least mostly Light Side). Still, you’re not trying to directly take on the Star Forge, just Malak. Your point still stands, though. :)
Tim on 18 March 2013, 10:51 said:
I think the key sign of a Sue / Stu is having a noticeable warping effect on the story. Being always right, more powerful or special than anyone in the setting really ought to be or their view of the world being indistinguishable from objective narration are all symptoms of that. That’s why the classic Sue litmus test has so many questions; it’s a pattern of writing, not just one specific thing.
Let’s say we have a TV series for kids that’s about a bunch of anthropomorphised tools. They live in a toolbox and every week they solve problems and teach kids about how working together is important and the like. So there’s a saw, a hammer, a screwdriver, and so on.
Now, let’s say in the second season we bring in a new character called Swiss who is a Swiss Army Knife. He’s totally awesome because he can do lots of things! But then we run into the problem that he can do things himself that would have required several tools working together before. So how do we solve this?
Well, Swiss isn’t great at being a hammer, so everything’s going to need some hammering. And maybe he’s a bit cocky so he gets into trouble, and…
You might be noticing that rather than writing stories about the other characters, we are now writing stories from the starting point of why Swiss can’t do everything himself. This is the kind of effect a Sue / Stu has, even when the story is trying not to be about them it’s still written explicitly with them in mind. Everyone talks about them in their absence, everything they say matches objective reality, every challenge has to be built around their powers and abilities even if that’s just making it so they can’t win by themselves, etc.
Yeah, but in terms of say Dead Space where Isaac Clarke can survive attacks that instakill NPCs you certainly start getting the disagreeable feeling that the rules of this universe are being bent for your sake (or as a misguided attempt to make the monsters scary by implying they’re far more powerful than they actually are).
Eh, I’ve never really liked Gordon as an example because Gordon is basically just a robot that does things other people tell him to do, and his character (scientist) doesn’t match his abilities (really good at shooting people).
swenson on 18 March 2013, 12:35 said:
I never thought about this from this perspective before, but that is a really excellent point. A good character-based story should probably be based on what characters can do, not why they can’t do X, Y, or Z.
True, he might not be the greatest example of a character ever, but I still don’t think he’s a Sue—a bit of a shell, perhaps, but not really a Sue. It’s true that everyone is like GORDON FREEMAN LET US FAWN ALL OVER YOU but even then you can’t do everything on your own (and nobody expects you too—you’re around to help the Resistance, not be the Resistance).
Tim on 18 March 2013, 12:59 said:
Oh, I don’t think Gordon’s really capable of being a Sue, he gives me the opposite problem. I really think if you were trying to interpret the story into a movie and didn’t know Gordon was the title character you’d probably cut him out of the story entirely because the real protagonist is Alyx. That said, why not just make the player character Alyx? Then rather than saving her father I’d be saving my father. Same with Ramirez and Foley; you get a weird feeling in MW2 that Foley has somehow taken out a life insurance policy on Ramirez and is looking to collect, whereas if you were Foley saying “You guys go over there and I’ll do this” you’d get a sense your guy was brave and believed in leading from the front.
Bottom line, I hate silent protagonists in games because rather than asking you to empathise with a character they just cut a hole in the story and tell you to stick your head through it.