I was about to say, I loved Futurama, It’s run it’s course, I’m fine with Meanwhile being the series finale (especially since as broadcast it ended with them pushing the time loop button, and they aired the first episode after that) and I’m ready to move on.
Two occur to me: Chell from the Portal games, and Lufia from Lufia and the Fortress of Doom. And both of those almost don’t count.
I almost don’t want to count Chell because she’s almost not a character, but I’ve had quite a bit of fun playing as her.
Lufia is one of the rare SNES JRPGs not made by Squaresoft or Enix, it was published by Taito. Gameplay is similar to classic Final Fantasy, the story manages to be quite tragic. Lufia, the title character, is not the player character, Enter Your Name is the player character, and Lufia is a playable party member/his love interest/…well, play the game to find out. So there’s reasons why I hesitate to call her a “protagonist.”
I have to mention a fun thing that series did: Lufia 1 starts with a playable prologue/tutorial section where you play as some legendary heroes fighting an ultimate battle. Lufia 2 is a prequel, and it’s the story of those legendary heroes, which ends with that same ultimate battle as the final boss. In Lufia 1, the heroes speak very formally. They sound stalwart and brave and a bit old fashioned, as legendary heroes should. In Lufia 2, we know these characters more as real people, and the dialog treads the exact same ground but it’s much less formal, makes them sound less hypercompetent.
I made the mistake of trying to go back and play Portal 2 during the pandemic, and the themes of isolation, neglect, abuse and gaslighting just weren’t as funny in 2019.
I’ll allow it for smaller studios that have a big, offbeat idea. Games like Factorio, Satisfactory, Kerbal Space Program and Subnautica. All of these games had multi-year early access campaigns that were very successful, Satisfactory in particular. I think it’s appropriate for weird games like these that have uncommon mechanics like factory building, space flight or scuba diving.
Thinking about Satisfactory, I imagine their sales weren’t spectacular on launch day last year, but a lot of their customer base had already bought the game, so they got their $30. Maybe another way to phrase it is, who cares if it sells before or after launch?
Looking at my game library, I seem to prefer blank slate player characters.
In Factorio, you play as a humanoid in a jumpsuit. In Satisfactory, you play as a humanoid in a jumpsuit. Infinifactory you play as a humanoid in a space suit. Antichamber you play as some being that can hold a gun-like tool. Buckshot Roulette you play as…something that can fire a shotgun. In all Half-Life and Portal games you play as a series of named but barely characterized people. Return of the Obra Dinn you play as an investigator, each time you start the game it randomly chooses a male or female voice for the player character. In Subnautica, you play as a stuffed wetsuit.
That was the one where you had to use cat hair to add a mustache to a fake ID to impersonate a character that had no mustache? Yeah, I don’t really miss moon logic.