Love to Hate You: The 10 Most Unlikeable Game Protagonists
With rumors of a new Grand Theft Auto game confirmed, we’ve been thinking a lot about how heroes are hard to find. In the old days, video game protagonists were morally upright plumbers or ravenous yellow circles. As the medium has evolved, we’ve been presented with player characters who have darker sides. But sometimes, developers go too far in trying to make their heroes funny, or edgy, or morally complex, and the end result is a game protagonist that’s absolute torture to control. Here’s our Hall of Shame of the most unlikeable characters to ever feel our joysticks.
Social satire is a very tricky genre for video games to play in, and studios mess it up more often than not. One of the most egregious examples is American McGee’s 2006 Bad Day L.A, where you play as homeless Angeleno Anthony Williams. A former agent, Anthony has fallen on hard times and has to deal with numerous disasters, but none are as terrible as the game’s script. Anthony spurts horrible one-liners throughout the experience, and the voice acting is equally inept. Anthony’s awfulness is mediated slightly by the fact that everybody else in the game is almost as stereotypical and bad, but it’s not enough to save him from this list.
The Grand Theft Auto series revels in moral ambiguity, but even diehard fans had a hard time empathizing with Trevor in GTA V. The scuzzy drug smuggler and gunrunner is callous and obscene even by franchise standards, making his debut by viciously stomping biker gang VP Johnny Klebitz to death. Whenever you have to play as Trevor in GTA V it feels bad, like you need to take a shower afterward. He’s constantly flying off the handle and murdering people, betraying his friends, and just generally leaving a trail of chaos behind
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