REBUTTAL TO: YOU Are The Hero... Or Are You?
The silent hero. For as long as the RPG has existed, the main character with absolutely no dialogue, and thus, no real influence on the story, has been around. It is the most aggrivating, useless, and ultimately counter-productive aspect of the RPGs that employ it.
One of the most famous, or rather infamous, examples I can think of at the moment would be Chrono Trigger for the Super NES. The gameplay was fun, to be sure, but the story was an absolute trainwreck, and a large part of that was from the silent hero. Being silent, he felt like a non-entity throughout the entire proceeding. His two girl-toys would often speak for him, and he just blindly followed along wherever he was led. He was so unimportant that it was even possible to beat the game without him!
The main argument in favor of silent characters is that the character is supposed to represent the player in the story. I don't know about anyone else here, but if I'm supposed to be the hero, I'd like the rest of the party to be required to resurrect me before going off and beating the final boss, if only as a matter of courtesy.
There are, of course, other barriers to the whole idea of the silent hero being a personification of the player. Let's look at a few, in no particular order.
One, the racial difference. Obviously there aren't any elves in the real world, nor are there any magic users, but RPG heroes tend to be white, as they tend to be based on northern European mythology. How is a black player, regardless of background, supposed to be able to relate to a white character? For that matter, how am I, a hispanic living in a hispanic neighborhood, supposed to relate to a white character? I like to think of myself as being progessive, but I can scarcely claim to understand the thought processes of other ethnic groups in reality. How do they percieve things differently than someone of my ethnicity and background would? Of course, the lack of diversity in RPG characters in general is a subject I'm surprised no one (to my knowledge) has ever talked about, but that's another editorial for another day.
Secondly, there's the gender issue discussed in the previous editorial. The only female leads I can think of at the moment were speaking roles, namely Cornet of Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure and co-leads Terra and Celes from Final Fantasy VI. I think the main character of the Master System RPG Phantasy Star may have been silent and female, but it's been a while since I played that one. This leaves a long string of silent male heroes in RPGs. I don't think I need to explain how this would affect female game players, especially as most of them are heterosexual. This of course leads to the reason gender selection is not a feature in modern RPGs with silent heroes. The problem is that these RPGs tend to have only one, maybe two possible romantic interests throughout the game, and they all tend to be female. The only RPGs at all that I can think of with love interests of both genders are western RPGs Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel (Opposite gender from what you choose) and Fable (The hero can pursue either straight or gay relationships). Notice how one of those two lets you choose gender? For some reason, the idea of a male being the "love interest" character isn't appealing to game developers for the most part. This leads to soft, domesticated female characters next to the hero, such as the majority of the romantic interests in Azure Dreams, a game that drove me right up the friggin' wall. Imagine a female character having only female love interests. I'm sure lesbians would love it, but what about the rest of the female RPGamers out there? I'm sure they'd be put off to see their personification leaning in to kiss the rediculously proportioned, scantily clad sex doll at the end of a long, arduous adventure.
Another problem is the frequent tendancy of other characters to speak on behalf of the hero. With the exception of showing the hero recapping previous events, usually interaction with other non-player characters is handled by other members of the party. This creates an image of the main character being indecicive, perhaps even reclusive, and willing to hand off responsibility to others. These aren't exactly hero traits. This also lends to the feeling that, rather than actually going along on an adventure, the hero is just being dragged along on a series of events that he really has no control over. Heros are made of sterner stuff, at least I'd think.
Lastly, without any real input of his own, the silent hero tends to be unimportant. I go back to the Chrono Trigger example. If a hero has no real say in how things go, why is he so important? Why can't the rest of the party just up and go fight the horrible evil on their own without this recluse, barring some cliche about prophecy or somesuch. The hero is just there to get the characters that actually matter together, and after that, it probably makes no difference whether he exists or not. If the game's story, and more importanly its ending, would honestly work just as well without the character, that's a sign that something's wrong.
With those issues addressed, I'd like to close off by saying that there really isn't much of a place for silent heroes in the modern, story-driven RPG. They're more of a detraction than anything else, and most RPG stories are done a severe disservice for the use of this tired cliche.
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