For animated series it has been a very good month, for me it means that two of my favorites are finished or going to be. While both are as different as night and day, they both feature one element that really elevates each series to something incredible, true character growth which I’ve yet to see any video game really accomplish this.The series are Death Note and Avatar, calling either one a cartoon would be a huge disservice, as both are more mature then most of the programming on other channels. I’m going to try to show these examples without spoiling any of the main plot lines but there will be minor spoilers.
Death Note has been my favorite anime for some time now, it’s a tale of a very deadly game of cat and mouse between two amazing characters with one of the best villains I’ve seen anywhere. For this example however I’m going to talk about a minor character, Matsuda. Since the introduction to this character he has always been a fairly insignificant character. The rest of the cast ignores him and leaves him to do the menial work during the investigation. The first time he tries to stand out and prove himself to his fellow detectives, he not only almost blows the investigation but almost gets himself killed in the process. Which puts him back into the backdrop for the rest of series until the very end. In a very shocking moment not only does he prove himself, but he finally steps out of the shadow and has a major impact on the story. I can’t say what he did to finally have his moment, but it made my jaw drop for the entire scene.
Moving on to Avatar, while the series is just about over it does feature one of the most impressive character arcs I’ve seen. I’m going to be talking about Zuko, who has had one hell of a transformation throughout the series . He was introduced as the antagonist and hunter of the hero, and came off as the stereotypical jerk . As time goes on we see the events that have shaped the life of this character, both the positive and negative forces at work that made him who he is. The series does an excellent job of expanding on his back story and just how conflicted he is about what he wants in life and what he’s doing. The best part is that while he’s growing as a character, he never changes like a flick of a switch but grows slowly with each encounter. With the final few episodes we get to see another side of Zuko which is not only funny to watch, but really shows who he is and it’s a shame that we’re only going to see a few episodes of this side of his personality.
With that out of the way it’s time to get to the point of this entry, adding in a true sense of character growth. Time and time again in games we have one dimensional characters who may be interesting, but stay the same way throughout the story. Any changes to these characters are either so obvious that it doesn’t come as a shock, or so quick that there is no meaning in this event. Once again I blame Bioware, as supposed experts on RPGs I’ve yet to see them actually develop a character who could be considered real(don’t even get me started on Kotor,and I haven’t played Mass Effect yet). Square Enix has also not made a realistic character in any of the Final Fantasy games either. Yes characters may become good or evil but we’re never really shown the events leading up to this and the fallout of this action from both the person and the people around them.
I want to see characters grow personality wise across a game, no more instant transformations but a gradual growth from the events . I want to see characters really have a heroic call moment or a real fall from grace into villainy. One problem I think is the length of games. Having something like this in a 8 hour game would be too fast and really cheapen the moment, which means we’ll have to save this for either 50 hour rpgs or stories split among titles in a series. I believe this element is missing from game writing whether by a design choice, or that no one has really attempted to make a game with this type of growth.
I hoped that the JRPG genre would be able to do this, as their games are more often interactive books but there hasn’t been any moments like what I have in mind that I’ve seen.
Josh
