- Joined
- Sep 3, 2018
- Favourite title
- Shenmue
- Currently playing
- Rise of the Ronin
Feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but I think understand where you are coming from. You prefer a middle ground between an established avatar with their personality and one without. So that you can feel a personal connection and relate to the character. If this is the case, I can understand and respect that viewpoint.This is something I have always loved about Shenmue. The fact that I’m playing as a completely different person, and yet, it feels like I’m the one in Ryo’s shoes. Whenever I talk about Shenmue with people, I use statements like ‘I need to find Lan Di’ even though it’s a story with set characters. If Shenmue were a book or a show, nobody would say things like that. But the fact that Shenmue is a game allows it to be the most immersive experience possible. I think that’s what I love about games. When a game has a character with their own story and motivations, and yet the player can project themselves onto that character.
I think games sometimes lose that magic with all of the custom character options out there. Don’t get me wrong, I love having that feature in some games. I just think that even though you created the character yourself, it loses the impact on the story. I don’t know if this makes any sense, but for me, the more you get to personalize the main character, the less of a connection I feel. I think that Yu Suzuki was able to create a character that was ‘blank’ enough for the player to project but not to a point where Ryo has no personality at all.
I will simply state where I am coming from. As someone who has grown up with role-playing games (both tabletop and video games), I tend to lean a bit more towards a custom avatar than a designed one. The reason for this is because I feel they are me in every sense of the word because of the effort I put into them. This is not to say that established avatars are poorly designed because they are not, it is just how I connect to a character.
In either case, you and I can agree that Yu Suzuki did an outstanding job in finding a nice middle ground between the two. In either case, thank you very much for your input in my meager opinion.