Nah, I'm only messin' with ya...read on...
This was another hotly contested category. Obviously, Big John and his Wild West adventures are pretty high up there on my list of bad-ass awesomeness (combined with a tender, touching backstory...and oh God, now I'm listening to "Deadman's Gun" and tearing up again...), but since this is meant to be a blog about video games in general, and not "my collection of reasons why Red Dead Redemption should be left in hotel rooms like Bibles", I'll go for a bit more variety.
If I learnt anything from essay subjects ("Judging from your writing, you obviously didn't!", yells some wag from the cheap seats), it's that you can get a good couple of paragraphs out of re-interpreting the question. So, how am I judging my "favourite"? Is it the hero whom I admire most? The one with whom I'd most like to have a beer? The one whose story and adventures are most compelling (though, that falls more under "story" than "hero")? The most fully developed and interesting character?
Yessir, there sure are a lot of heroes...
The problem is that almost every game and hero I've enjoyed have had *something* special about them, so this list could go on for ever. For sheer longevity of fantastic games, how do you choose between Mario and Link? For heroes with compelling stories, you could just stick a pin into a list of RPG's, especially those from Bethesda, Black Isle, or Bioware (hmm, I sense a trend!), from Commander Sheppard, to the Bhaalspawn, to The Warden; The Vault Dweller, JC Denton (yes, Deus Ex was an RPG), The KotOR protagonist, they're all fantastic. Hell, I even had a soft spot for this guy:
Oh come on! Don't tell me you didn't like him a LITTLE bit...
But then I realised that there's a simple answer. An individual hero, with their own personal traits and character, whose story was epic and original.
It's me.
Whaaaaaaaat?
No, I'm not suffering from some crazy delusion that I'm actually a video game character. Allow me to explain.
As much as I love computer RPG's, they suffer from a fundamental restriction. In a Pen & Paper campaign, the story possibilities are literally limited only by the imagination of the players and DM. You could defeat that dragon with a potent combination of magic, stealth, and brawn - or, as I saw tweeted the other day, you could magically raise your speechcraft and charisma to such a level that you can convince it to stop fighting and read some of your Paladin's religious pamphlets, before offering it (poisoned) tea and biscuits.
Oh Internet, you provide a picture for every occasion...
(no, not like that...)
In a CRPG, however, such departure from the intended plan isn't possible. Gamemakers do their best to allow you the illusion of free choice, moral decisions, and alternative routes of progression, but in reality, you can only do things that they've planned to allow you to do.
Within these restrictions, however, The Elder Scrolls series is famous for allowing the player a bewilderingly vast range of options in how to play, where to go, and what to do. After the by-now-traditional "wake up as a prisoner" opening, and a brief introductory mission, you are pretty much free to do as you like. Become a drug dealer. Become a vampire. Serve the Gods, or sign a demonic pact. Join the Assassins, or the Thieves. Join the guards, and hunt them down. Buy a horse and ride all the way from the mountains at the top of the world to the swampy marshlands in the south, or deep into arid dry deserts. Wander the wilderness, hunting animals for food and furs, and live in a cave. Strip naked, run into the main city, and hand everyone wild flowers. Yes, you can only act within the confines of the developers imagination, but what an imagination they had!
...and what drugs they had!
I've never played Arena or Daggerfall, but Morrowind and Oblivion were two of the widest, most well-imagined gaming experiences of my life. They weren't without their flaws, certainly - the levelling systems were a little sketchy, the NPC voice acting didn't always stay at the same great level of the main characters (PATRICK STEWART!), and the AI was sometimes a bit sketchy - but for games as ambitious as these, such minor shortfalls are negligible. I'm HUGELY looking forward to seeing if Skyrim stays to the same high standards of world-building while ironing out some of the problems.
So, my favourite hero, is the one I made myself. Be they The Hero of Kvatch, The Grand Spymaster of The Blades, The Arch-Mage, The Gray Fox, The Listener, The Dragonborn, or The Nerevarine, they're all a step along the path to a truly immersive and open-ended story-telling experience in a computer game.
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