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What Defines Successful Game Characters?
Thanks to TotalGames.net for their feature discussing what makes a videogame character popular. They point out that "almost every character-led game will see a significant chunk of development time spent honing, adjusting and, in some cases, scrapping characters", and discuss Link's famous make-over for Zelda: The Wind Waker, saying "...the outcry that greeted this graphical overhaul underlines just how important game characters are to players." However, the piece concludes: "But for every ignored genius, there are hundreds of mediocre and downright irritating game icons lurking on the shelves", citing Ty the Tasmanian Tiger and the Poochy-like Bitmap Kid as examples of the bad in character design.
Spiky hair = big bucks!
You can't have a successful character without either a successful story or an aesthetic quality of some sort that overrides the lack of interest-holding narrative. Just like fictional characters.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
The use of focus groups is now widespread and developers are more than happy to use them. "We want I Ninja to be successful and the focus groups gave us a chance to try and find out what people liked and did not like," explains Wayne Binningham, lead artist on I Ninja. Midgley agrees: "Together with Microsoft we used focus groups when developing Kung Fu Chaos as we didn't want to end up creating characters that no-one wanted to play."
I think this article lost most of its credibility with this section. One of the main complaints in several of the reviews for Kung Fu Chaos was that all of the characters were boring, generic characters that no one in the review staff wanted to play. The same complaints have been voiced for I Ninja, who looks like nothing more inspired or interesting than a generic cartoon ninja. Take an '80s action movie ninja, super-deform him, and there you go, you've got I Ninja. How they think that that is an inspired design or that it is somehow anywhere near as unique as a lightning fast blue hedgehog or an Italian plumber that fights evil mushrooms, turtles, and dinosaurs by stomping on them is beyond me.
And I think that what makes a successful character is, quite simply, gameplay. Look at that list on the left there. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Mario, Chun-Li, Sonic, Bomberman, Pikachu... just go through the whole damn thing and try to spot the popular character that was in a game that sucked. Or that was just mediocre. You won't find one, because not only were Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, Street Fighter 2, Sonic the Hedgehog, and all of the others great games, but even the first Tomb Raider wasn't that bad.
People will buy a game that does not suck. They will even buy games that don't suck, but have characters that definitely DO suck, like Ratchet & Clank and Jak & Daxter. They will even buy games that look "kiddie", regardless of what your ridiculous focus group says. If the original I Ninja was "too kiddie" for the focus groups, then what do you think they said about Wind Waker, one of the best selling platformers of the year?
The outcry was mainly from people who thought Ocarina of Time was the first Zelda game. If you look at the whole Zelda series, Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask look out of place; Wind Waker fits right in. Zelda 3 in particular has a nice bright cartoonish look. Zelda 1 was clearly intended to look like a cartoon, but the NES couldn't stress that very well. Look at the Zelda 1 manual - it has an in game picture of every enemy, and also a hand drawn Wind Waker style artwork drawing of the enemy.
The other reason for complaints was the graphic quality when they first revealed the cell shading was significantly lower than the final game.
The original Spaceworld demo never really impressed me. When I watched it, it just didn't look like a game to me. I also like the 2D Zeldas much better than the 3D ones. Combine the two factors and I was actually rather glad when they showed the cell shaded game - it actually looked like a Zelda game to me. Too bad the game had a few fatal flaws in it; it really had the potential to be an excellent game. A Wind Waker: Master Quest would be excellent...