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…”