Silent Protagonists are an interesting type of character for a piece of media. I’ve been paying attention to how games handle a silent protagonist over the years, and this video is just me talking about my feelings on the trope.
Series like Metroid, Half-Life, Portal, and Doom are defined by their silent protagonist. It’s an interesting narrative design decision that really allows the writers to flex their brain muscles. But what happens when a silent protagonist goes voiced?
Here, I talk about that, more likely than not, unfortunate situation.
Transcript:
Alright, let’s try something out here. What’s the first video game character you think of when I say “Silent Protagonist”? Go on, think for a second. I’ll wait.
…
Times up.
I’m sure a lot of you out there thought of characters like Gordon Freeman or Chell. There’s classics like Doomguy and Samus, but I bet some people also picked Link and one of the playable characters from the Persona series. Or maybe, if you were thinking real outside the box, you might have said any playable character in an MMO.
They’re all valid answers. But each of them represent a different interpretation of the “Silent Protagonist”.
Lets look at the first group of characters I mentioned. Gordon Freeman from Half-Life and Chell from Portal. These are probably the most pure interpretations of the concept. They’re existing characters in the world they live in. They have a history that you can learn. But they don’t really have character development throughout the story.
Let’s look at Chell from Portal and Portal 2. She wakes up in the first game trapped in a facility, forced to play along with the all-seeing GlaDOS. But she doesn’t have any internal conflict. She isn’t distraught at being forced to play these games at the metaphorical hands of GlaDOS.
Or maybe she is. We just don’t know. But that’s the point of her character. The writers of the game weren’t interested in exploring the personal conflicts of Chell, they were interested in how GlaDOS interacts with Chell as a blank slate. And it’s a similar case with Gordon Freeman and the Half-Life series. The writers of the game were obviously interested in writing how these various groups of people in hiding from the Combine interact with Gordon and his hero-like status.
So there’s something I want to look at with all of the different types of Silent Protagonists, and that’s examine how the story itself handles that character type. I want to look at how the writers are forced to write around a main character who isn’t able to talk to the other characters.
I’ll look again at Portal here, because I’m more familiar with it than Half-Life.
I think the writing in Portal and Portal 2 handles the idea of a Silent Protagonist phenomenally. That’s because the events in the story are mostly reliant upon other characters acting, rather than Chell. One of my biggest pet peeves in games with Silent Protagonists, is when you feel like there’s a character that should be speaking but their audio track got muted or something.
Borderlands, as a series, exemplifies that problem for me. I haven’t played Borderlands 3, so I can’t say if it addressed what I’m about to talk about, so just assume I’m talking about the first 3 games. It’s a series full of crazy characters and silly scenarios, nearly every character has something funny to say. Except for the player character.
Granted, the character you do pick has voice lines during combat when they use abilities or whatever, but they’re silent for a majority, if not all, of the time outside of combat, so they fit my bill here for “Silent Protagonist” in terms of how the story is written. Side characters will just be talking at the player character, but the player character never has anything to say. Side characters are just a vessel to throw jokes at the player from the writers. I couldn’t imagine what having a conversation with a lot of the Borderlands NPCs would even be like, but I can imagine talking with NPCs from Half Life 2. Even though Gordon never talks, the conversations in the game feel realistic. The writers were smart about maintaining the facade of a real world, in spite of a character that doesn’t talk for some inexplicable reason. That’s why people love Half-Life and Portal.
Next up, I wanna talk about MMOs. Specifically, the player character and how they interact with the plot.
It’s kind of tangential, but it fascinates me.
Stories in video games traditionally revolve around the player being the “chosen one” or something similar. It might feel kinda contrived in a single player game like Fallout, but for me, it’s easy to suspend my disbelief. It’s a lot harder to deal with that type of plot point in an MMO.
I’ve been playing a lot of Final Fantasy 14 recently, so I’ll use it as an example.
They just ignore it. The game rarely, if ever, addresses the fact that you are one of millions of other players in the same position. It’s kind of frustrating during boss fights, they’ll talk about how they’re fighting “the warrior of light”, when in reality, they’re fighting 4 or 8 warriors of light.
To be honest, I can’t think of another game that tries to actually address that. I haven’t played a lot of MMOs or other living games, so I’m probably biased. If you can think of any games that acknowledged the huge number of player characters, comment it below. I’m curious to learn of what games actually try and tackle that problem.
Final Fantasy 14’s story is basically just like any other Final Fantasy game, but with raids and pvp. It’s kind of impressive really. I’ve been playing through the series for a yet undisclosed reason, and its probably in my top 5 stories of the series so far. If you know anything about the game, its probably that the base game is kind of a slog. But it gets better after that, I promise.
Anyway, in the story, the player character rarely says anything. Occasionally, someone will ask them a question, but then they’ll just gesture about like they’re talking, but no dialog is actually written for them. Occasionally you can pick between a few options, but its very rare.
It still definitely does the “character gets talked to” thing that Borderlands does, where you’re just a vessel to hear what some character is thinking at the time, but it handles it in a more believable manner. It also helps that you aren’t really alone with one character very often, you’re like to be surrounded by your comrades during any given story cutscene, so they can just bounce off each other while you sink into the shadows.
This method of storytelling focuses on the supporting characters, rather than the player. It’s like Half Life in the way that the writers never really acknowledge the player as a character with depth. But instead of Gordon Freeman running around by himself, there’s millions of Gordon Freemans.
That’s it, that’s all I have to say. End it, just end the section here.
I’m gonna spend the majority of this video talking about the last type of silent protagonist. To finish it off, lets look at Doomguy and Samus. They might seem like they fit into the previous category of Silent Protagonists, but there’s one crucial difference that sets them apart.
They’re both characters that were Silent Protagonists, but were eventually given voiced lines in later games.
This is something you see all the time in older game properties being adapted for newer games in their series. With Doomguy, the big change happened in 2020’s Doom: Eternal. The Doom series was rebooted in 2016 with the plainly titled Doom. It was definitely not the first game to go with a simple name for a reboot of a classic series, Triple A games have been trying that for a while with series like Tomb Raider, Thief, and Hitman. Hey, all attempts by Square Enix, isn’t that something.
Luckily, Doom 2016 was absolutely fantastic. It wasn’t exactly classic Doom, but they really captured what people think Doom should feel like. And I think that’s an important thing to point out. They didn’t slavishly recreate Doom as it was back then. They took the core of the game, running around and shooting, and modernized it. And the developers even added their own little flair to it. They both recreated Doom as we imagined it back then and created their own interpretation of the franchise. And Doom Eternal, being a sequel to Doom 2016, is an extension of that interpretation. But for some people, they went a bit too far with their own take on the series.
It’s pretty obvious that the team working on Doom Eternal wanted to push the series forward instead of just making Doom 2016 but with more levels. And oh boy did they do that. The new game introduces a ton of new mechanics, and to some players, that draws attention away from what Doom is to them; the running and shooting at mach speed. Instead of running and shooting, you’re forced to do a platforming section or sit through, god-forbid, a cutscene. John Carmack, lead programmer of the original Doom, is famously quoted as saying, Story in a game is like a story in a…
Uhh, can I say that on Youtube? I don’t know what YouTube’s really doing nowadays so I’ll just err on the side of caution here.
Story in a game is like a story in a hhehh movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.
He commented on that quote in 2018, adding that while games based entirely on the story can be done well, the most important games have been all about the play, not the story.
Whether I think that’s true or not doesn’t really matter. What I think matters here, is that someone so fundamental to the creation of Doom said that. So when the new Doom game featured story elements more than any other game in the series, I can understand why people were upset. They didn’t like that the series was going in a different direction than what it means to them.
So what does all that have to do with the concept of a Silent Protagonist? Like I said earlier, Doom Eternal is the first mainline game in the series, that I know of, where he has actual voiced lines. Here’s a bit of that cutscene where we hear him speak for the first time:
Now, to a lot of people, that perfectly encapsulates who the Doomguy is. A blood-thirsty dude with an insatiable need to RIP and TEAR.
But I’m not gonna lie here, it kinda took away some of the magic of Doom 2016.
It was a game that built Doomguy up as this god-like force that can’t be stopped by any demon. He was a mystery. You start the game by waking up in a Sarcophagus and immediately killing Demons. No time is spent on your backstory in the beginning, you’re just thrown into the demon meat-grinder. I don’t remember how much is spent on Doomguy’s story in Doom 2016, but I know it wasn’t a lot. And that lack of information about him as a character allowed me to fill the blanks on his hypothetical character sheet. And when they show his face for the first time and have him start talking, it contradicts my own headcanon of the character.
Now I’m not necessarily saying its a bad thing that they’re further developing the Doomguy character, I’m just saying that by adding new character dimensions, they’re forcing the player to rewrite who Doomguy is to them. And if the player doesn’t like the direction that the character was taken in, then it might even retroactively ruin certain aspects of previous games that they enjoyed.
I can still play Doom 2016 today and enjoy the hell out of it. But I won’t be able to enjoy the writing of the game as much as I did before Doom Eternal came out, because I didn’t like the direction they took some of Doomguy’s character traits.
Again, I think the developer should be able to do whatever they want with a character. But there’s an inherent risk in elaborating on character features that made them iconic in the first place.
And for that, we need look no further than Metroid. Other M.
If you’re a Metroid fan, I don’t really need to explain how the game fits into what I’m trying to say here. But for those not familiar, I’ll elaborate.
Metroid Other M was a game for the Wii that was unlike any other game in the series. Well it was kinda like Metroid Fusion, but kinda not. Metroid Fusion was the first game in the series to place any emphasis on story. Metroid Prime came out literally the day before and Retro Studios put a lot of effort into the story in that game, but the focus was different to that of Fusion. In Prime, the story and lore was given to you by you going out of your way to read logs dotted around the world. There weren’t many segments in the game dedicated to forcing the player to pay attention to the plot. That did change in later games, but it wasn’t as big of a thing in the first Prime.
Fusion was more direct in its storytelling, and a more linear game as a result. Once you enter a new area, you enter a dialogue sequence where a character talks to you and you’re forced to listen to what they have to say about the plot or whatever. And on top of that, at the end of these sequences, you’re often told exactly where to go. Like it’ll pan your map to a point and say “go here”. It was kinda frustrating to me when I played for the first time, because I was used to the (seemingly) open-ended progression of Super Metroid. I say “seemingly” because the map is kind of linear for someone that isn’t a crazy sequence-breaking speedrunner. There are a lot of moments in the game where you feel like you have a ton of paths you can explore, but they cut off pretty quickly and leave only one main path forward. I think the map in Super Metroid is really well designed in that it makes you feel like you’re exploring this crazy huge map on your own, but you’re secretly being led by the level designers along a mostly set path.
Fusion partly does away with the developer’s invisible hand and just straight up tells you where to go next. When a character in game tells you to travel to the end of this segment of the map to turn on the power or whatever, I feel like that patronizes the player. In that example, if I enter a map that has all the lights out and the save point doesn’t work, I think any normal player would deduce that they had to figure out a way to turn on the power.
Unfortunately, Nintendo took the idea of patronizing the player and decided to build a whole game around it.
But before that let me give a little context as to how the franchise as a whole fits into Nintendo’s catalog of IPs before going into how it abandoned in a dumpster out behind a McDonalds and then spat on. Now, Metroid was never a series to top the sales charts. Among the best selling game franchises of all time, there are 15 IPs that I would claim as “Nintendo Franchises” that are ahead of Metroid. Hell, Nintendogs is ahead of Metroid.
But I think that speaks to how niche the franchise has always been. I’m not really sure WHY it didn’t take off like Zelda or Kirby, at least in the 80s and 90s. I think the fact that there was no hit Nintendo 64 Metroid game played a huge part in the size of the franchise today, now that I think about it. Mario, Zelda, Kirby, Mario Kart, Donkey Kong, all iconic franchises that transitioned to 3d and were many children’s favorite games. But Samus just skipped that generation altogether. I would say that this was the beginning of the fall for the series, since it likely fell out of people’s minds as they were drawn to a series like Zelda or Kirby that actually got games.
But that’s not really the case. Metroid Prime, on the gamecube, is the best selling game in the franchise. It’s the console where Metroid is closest to being the best selling game. The other consoles with major series entries have their Metroid for that console in the 20s or 30s, but its number 7 on the gamecube.
So I don’t know how Prime fits into my narrative here. It’s the best selling game of the franchise, and was one of the best selling games on, admittedly, one of Nintendos worst selling mainline consoles.
I think it’s fair to say that while people enjoyed Metroid Prime, it was more of a one off. It didn’t get people interested in the series as a whole. And while Retro did probably the best job they could have done, it still wasn’t enough to capture the general public’s heart like Mario Kart: Double Dash or any of the Mario Parties did.
It’s been downhill since then. Metroid is a series that a lot of people hold VERY close to their heart. And one of the key developers on the original Metroid, Yoshio Sakamoto, wanted to finally give Metroid the attention he thought it, and many longtime fans, deserved.
So he started work on Metroid Other M.
I’m not gonna beat around the bush here. Other M received as much hate as it did because it went against player’s perception of Samus. The whole series is built upon the understanding that Samus is a badass. The first game actually goes out of its way to trick you into thinking that Samus is a dude, only to reveal that she’s a she. That trick is to show that this woman is as strong as any dude, as sexist as that might sound. While we live in a society with many strong female characters, there weren’t nearly as many in the late 80s. Her character is fundamentally built upon strength.
Other M takes the character in a “bold new direction”, if you can call it that. Sakamoto claimed he wanted to explore the character of Samus. For this game, that meant exploring her relationship with her commanding officer, Adam. She’s only allowed to go on a mission with Adam if she agrees to follow his every order. On paper that sounds okay, but in practice, it just serves to aggravate the player. Samus, as a character before this game, didn’t really have much going for her. Like I said earlier, strength is a core part of her identity, but that’s about it. Everything else is what the player extrapolates from that strength.
Her strength, her arguably one defined character trait, is subverted viciously in the story here. She constantly has to defer to Adam about what to do and what weapon to use.
If this was just a story problem, then I could see forgiving it in favor of great gameplay. That’s kind of what I did with Fusion. But the gameplay directly suffers as well.
You don’t find traditional upgrades like Beams and Suits laying around in the world like in all the games before it. You technically have them from the beginning. You just aren’t “authorized” to use them.
Progression and growth is at the heart of Metroid games. And there’s no progression or growth if Samus technically has the abilities but she just chooses not to use them.
Other M is a game that directly goes against a lot of what made the series great to a lot of people. Sakamoto, in his attempt to make Samus more relatable, just pissed off the fans that loved the games in the first place.
Now, I don’t think he’s wrong for taking the character in that direction. Metroid is practically his baby, he can do whatever he wants with it. But if I was in his place, trying to make a big-budget entry into a dormant franchise, I would value a few things. Of course I would have to question how accessible the game should be and what tone to aim for. But before any of that, I would consider why people like the games and the character of Samus in the first place. What makes it so special to so many people? Why does it top many polls of favorite Nintendo characters despite selling rather poorly overall?
I think I can identify the strength of the series as: exploration over everything else, atmosphere, and Samus’s stoic strength.
Metroid Other M had none of that. And it kinda tanked the series. Sakamoto said there was nothing he regretted about the game before it’s release, so he fully realized his vision. This wasn’t the result of major corporate interference, he just had a different idea of the character than most of the fans did.
I think that leads into a discussion to whether character’s belong to their creator or the fans, death of the author and all that jazz, but that’s out of the scope of this video.
I’ll say that while he achieved his goal for what he believed Samus to be, it just wasn’t the same Samus that everyone loved.
And that’s what makes silent protagonists special isn’t it? It forces the player to create their own headcanon for the character. We don’t know what the character thinks, and they don’t say anything, so the player’s mind is left to wander. While the base characteristics of Doomguy and Samus are set, each of the smaller details is left up to the player. And a developer choosing to elaborate on those smaller details must be wary of alienating the playerbase. Because they just might go against what made the character special in the first place.
Thanks for watching. Are there any games that handle the trope of a silent protagonist in a subversive way? Leave a comment telling me all about it. Also, leave a like, dislike, whatever, and sub while you’re down there. It’d really mean a lot. Thanks again, and I’ll see you on the flip.