Top Ten Favourite Game Characters

Games, by their nature, let you escape from reality and put yourselves in the shoes of powerful characters, and there’s no end of bad-ass protagonists as well as over-powered enemies. But what about those game characters that live on with you after the game is finished? The ones who made you laugh or cry – or both – and live on beyond the narrative of the game? The best games are those that draw you in to their world, and more often this is achieved through an emotional connection with a strong character. Here are our favourites.

10. Lily Bowen (Fallout: New Vegas)

The Fallout series of games are rightly considered some of the best RPGs ever made, and full of interesting characters. Our personal favourite may be an odd choice: Lily Bowen, a 75-year old grandmother ripped from the safety of her vault and forcibly mutated to become a Nightkin assassin.

Repeated use of Stealthboy technology has rendered Lily schizophrenic, and with Lily in your party, you’re faced with an agonising dilemma: do you tell Lily to stop taking her medication, so that she’ll become a rampaging monster, or do you encourage her to do the right thing and start taking the full dose, so that she’ll stop remembering her long-dead grandchildren and be at peace?

The stark contrast between Lily’s savage alter-ego and her plaintive conversations with her dead loved-ones help to form one of the most emotional bonds we’ve ever had with a game.

“Don’t worry pumpkin, grandma knows how to stay quiet.”

9. Cloud Strife (Final Fantasy VII)

Final Fantasy VII is arguably the best entry in the long-running RPG series; the superbly balanced combat, massive game world, thrilling storyline and larger-than-life characters make it one of our favourite RPGs of all time. Cloud Strife is quite possibly the reason we love it so much; he’s the original emo, thrown into a role he doesn’t want but forced to step up and take charge when the world is in danger.

He spends a lot of the game either sulking or shouting, but he’s not whiney like other FF characters (Squall, anyone?) – most importantly, he’s an absolute blast to play. You can’t remove him from your party, but that never matters because his limit breaks are the best in the game. The massive Buster Sword is just as iconic as his crazy blonde hair, so putting the two together and pulling out the Omnislash limit break means there’s nothing that can stand in your way.

“No one lives in the slums because they want to. It’s like this train. It can only go where the tracks take it.”

8. Morte (Planescape: Torment)

Planescape: Torment was a gem amongst role-playing games, set in a fantastical world where the protagonist is an immortal searching for his past. Waking up in a morgue, Morte the talking skull is the first… “thing” that you meet. Blessed with an acerbic wit and sharp teeth, Morte is constantly trying to recruit undead females into your party, although how he hopes to consummate his desires is never quite explained…

Morte isn’t just a witty sidekick, however. It turns out that you’ve come across him in a previous incarnation, and that you freed him from imprisonment in a tower of skulls in a demonic plane of existence. How he got there is revealed later in the game, and becomes a pivotal part of your story – how you react to this “reveal” can determine the game’s resolution, and forms one of the most powerful emotional attachments we’ve experienced in a game.

“Women were the reason I became a monk – and, ah, the reason I switched back…”

7. Barney (Half-Life series)

Half Life was rightly hailed as ground-breaking when it was released in 1997, partly due to its incredible opening sequence, and it’s at the end of the tram ride into the Black Mesa facility that you first meet “Barney”, who opens the door for you and then isn’t seen until Half-Life: Blue Shift, in which he is the protagonist. He later appears in the Half-Life 2 series as a member of the resistance, and the fact that he owes Gordon Freeman a beer for saving his life becomes a running joke between the characters.

In the US, “Barney” is a name associated with bumbling policemen, and the character was originally designed as a prototype for hostile security guards before being promoted to a main character. His character model was later chosen by Ian Chisholm for the lead role of John Rourke in the award-winning “Clear Skies” series of machinima, set in the Eve Online universe.

“Great job, Gordon! Throwing that switch and all, I can see your MIT education really pays for itself.”

6. Ken Rosenburg (Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, GTA: San Andreas)

The Grand Theft Auto series of games had some pretty colourful characters, but few that could be described as “lovable”. Ken Rosenberg is a Jewish lawyer that you meet early on in your career in Vice City, having just escaped from prison. He’s got a big deal going down, and your first assignment is to help him. Of course, it all goes horribly wrong, and you soon get the impression that Ken’s interest in the illicit goods being traded goes beyond the financial…

Ken supplies you with most of your starting missions, as you work to pay off the debt incurred by the failure of the first mission. He’s your lawyer, and can be heard bailing you out of jail if you get caught by the police (“Tommy Vercetti doesn’t even own a gun!”). Ken is probably based on David Kleinfeld (played by Sean Penn) in the movie Carlito’s Way. Beyond the physical similarities – the frizzy hair and Seventies suits – both characters’ behaviour goes steadily downhill as their coke habits get worse and worse.

“Do I look like I can intimidate a jury? I couldn’t intimidate a child, and believe me, I’ve tried.”

5. Tychus Findlay (Starcraft 2)

Tychus Findlay is the perfect foil to Jim Raynor’s flawed but heroic rebel. Jim and Tychus go way back – Tychus is the old friend you can’t bear to leave behind even though you’ve grown apart.

Sealed inside his marine armour to keep him loyal to his Dominion masters, Findlay is the devil on Raynor’s shoulder – his hard-bitten cynicism and search for profit at odds with Raynor’s near-bulletproof idealism, despite the many setbacks to his cause.

Findlay is a large part of Starcraft’s II’s comic relief, but there’s no escaping his dark nature – It’s no surprise that the two old friends finally come to blows, and Jim has to sacrifice his friendship for the greater good.

“Oh I dunno, some white knight kinda guy, came charging down to save her colony, maybe? Damn, Jimmy – you never could read the ladies.”

4. Kain (Legacy of Kain series)

From his first appearance in 1996 action-RPG Blood Omen, Kain was a different kind of protagonist. The game opens with his murder and transformation into a vampire, a fate that ultimately sees him driven on a quest to return balance to the land in the hope of restoring his own humanity in the process.

Kain’s character and pathos is driven by a strong script and outstanding voice acting from Simon Templeman. He’s a true anti-hero, quenching his bloodlust on the essence of his even more corrupted enemies. However, in the end, Kain succumbs to the temptations of power, damning the world of in the process and leading to his role in following games as a godlike force for evil.

“You dare speak to me of conscience? Only when you have felt the full gravity of choice should you dare to question my judgment!”

3. Stan (Monkey Island series)

Stan is one of the few characters that appears in every single Monkey Island game, popping up in a variety of dubious businesses and basically getting in the way of Guybrush. With his giant hat, hideous checked suit and constant chatter, Stan is the epitome of everything that’s wrong with salesmen.

Despite this and his terrible dodgy businesses we can’t help feel a little bit sorry for him. In The Secret of Monkey Island he gets punched into the sea; in Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge he gets nailed into a coffin by Guybrush; and in The Curse of Monkey Island, Guybrush buys life insurance from Stan, then gets a death certificate to cash in. It’s only in Escape from Monkey Island that Stan gets away without being hurt; Guybrush kind of makes up for this in Tales of Monkey Island by sending some moths to shred Stan’s famous outfit.

It’s this combination of sleazy salesman that would sell his own grandmother and victim to Guybrush that makes Stan such an endearing character.

“I’d stand on my head to make you a deal.”

2. Minsc (Baldur’s Gate, Baldur’s Gate II)

Minsc is a Ranger/Barbarian who appears first in Baldur’s Gate, a Dungeons & Dragons game developed by Bioware. Entrusted with protecting the witch Dynaheir, Minsc joins the protagonist after Dynaheir is killed by an evil mage, vowing to avenge her death by service to the forces of good.

While Minsc’s motives are pure, his methods reveal more than a hint of madness. He has a pet companion, a hamster called Boo who, according to Minsc, is actually a ‘Miniature Giant Space Hamster’. If you try and remove Boo from Minsc’s inventory, you are treated to a harsh glare from Minsc, who relies on Boo for wisdom and guidance.

Although Boo doesn’t behave like a normal familiar in the game, it’s assumed he’s fighting with Minsc, who encourages his little friend to “Go for the eyes!” The characters were so well-received that Bioware has even made reference to them in games such as Mass Effect 2 (Tali encourages her combat drone to “Go for the optics!”).

“Make way evil! I’m armed to the teeth and packing a hamster!”

1. GLaDOS (Portal, Portal 2)

GLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System) is an insane artificial intelligence with a soft spot for cake. Initially dreamt up as a character for the first level of Portal, she eventually stole the show and is now considered one of the top video game villains of all time. Even so, as your only guide through the puzzles of Portal and Portal 2, you can’t help but feel an attachment to her, and when you are betrayed towards the end of Portal 2, her vulnerability – reduced to a chip implanted into a sprouting potato – turns her into an unwilling but useful ally.

Perhaps her most engaging interaction is at the end of the first game, when you think you’ve killed her. As the final credits roll, she sings a jaunty but sinister song celebrating the motivational powers of cake and renewing her determination to continue her “experiments” in the name of science.

“Well done. Here are the test results: You are a horrible person. I’m serious, that’s what it says: A horrible person. We weren’t even testing for that.”