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| Six is. | |
| Posted By: Hawaiian Pig | Date: 9/28/10 12:01 a.m. |
In Response To: Who is Reach's main character, anyway? (SonofMacPhisto) : Having mostly lurked a lot of the discussion here regarding Reach's story, I : keep coming back to this question. Harmanimus' post here... : http://carnage.bungie.org/haloforum/halo.forum.pl?read=1017494 : ...really brought into focus the idea, for me, that Noble Team are supporting
: With that in mind, shouldn't discussion regarding character development and
This is a bit of a..... reach. Excusing the hit or miss nature of the cast in Reach on the grounds that the player ought to make-believe character development isn't really tenable. Leaving the player to assume the role of your main character can be on one hand revolutionary, and on the other hand downright lazy. It depends on how its done... and I honestly don't think Reach did this well. How does Noble 6 develop throughout the game? Where do you grow and change? What events occur that shape your development? What interactions do you get involved in that bring your character out? Really, the crux of the issue is: Describe Noble 6 to me without making things up. Give me references from within the game that directly reflect opportunities for his character's development. All I've got is Jorge's death. Really though, leaving your main character's personality in the hands of the audience is not particularly conducive to developing interesting characters. ...Not unless you let the player's actions significantly impact the course of the story's narrative. If you give the player choices to make, then you've got a chance to really develop a character. But this doesn't happen. This isn't Deus Ex. In actuality, Six is a character him/herself; s/he's not you, s/he's who you want him/her to be. Of course, in order to do this without letting the player make choices, he/she has to be pretty blank. Where my gender neutral pronouns at? What we really have is just have another faceless protagonist. A common video game trope. Noble Six is just like the Chief... they're both mostly silent player characters upon whom we project personality through very small windows into their identity. None of us can really give a strong argument for the Chief's development as a character throughout the Halo series (unless you look into the novels!); how can we possibly do the same for Six? What significantly differentiates these two? The difference between the Reach and the trilogy, however, is that the original games have an abundance of significant events that shape the supporting cast. You have a lot more opportunities to see them develop into worthwhile characters. Reach's cast is not so lucky. There's a heck of a lot of supporting characters, and they're all quickly given pretty stereotypical personalities and roles (save my bro Jorge) and quickly die. I think Reach may have benefited from reducing the squad to something like three members. Maybe something like the Alpha splinter of Spartan Red Team eh? Hmm! Woulda been cool. Anyway, I've gone on about the effect of events shaping characterization ad nauseum, so I won't reiterate those points here. But really... this sentiment seems like an utter cop out to me. It's like saying, "Oh the narrative was in your heart all along." Honestly, there needs to be some substance for you to work with before you can draw this kind of inference. Noble Six has no such substance. Kind of weak, really.
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