Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-628612-20151126212359/@comment-25786152-20151214131729

I despise all of the previous Ace Combat silent protagonists. For me, it really makes no sense whatsoever to have a protagonist like that in a game's story. Even if you DO like these kind of protagonist characters, I believe some ones like Master Chief from Halo do the job A LOT BETTER than any of the AC games' ones. Still, I despise them.

They say player characters are made this way so that it's easier for the player to imagine as if he/she was the character him/herself. But you see, the truth is, I cannot imagine myself as the character. I would never be able to. First of all, I'm not a fighter pilot in real life. I'm not a mercenary. Or even a regular militia soldier, etc. Secondly, these characters are totally devoid of personality; you'd wonder if Mobius 1/Cipher/Blaze/etc are even human. Even soldiers or mercenaries in real life are not devoid of emotion. But these characters ARE. I can and often do feel emotions, as any other normal person would, I guess. Whenever I read a story I do appreciate those personality traits on the characters, and it is from there that I'm able to feel or form some kind of "empathy" with these characters. I can understand how humans feel because I'm human myself. And that is exactly what gives me the ability to imaginarily "put myself on other person's shoes" so to speak. But to put myself on the shoes of a being that I don't know if it's even sentient, rational, let alone be human, that I find myself unable to do. So, I cannot imagine myself being Cipher because I don't know how Cipher is supposed to be. He might be an alien being, but I'm no alien, so I don't feel empathy, I cannot identify myself as him.

The closest thing to a playable character in AC that I liked was Will Bishop. So, I would really like "human" playable character(s) in AC7. Yes, I know they're human, but you know what I mean. Say whatever you want about Assault Horizon, but I liked the story, and the characters, it was the best AC game in that aspect. Bishop was a badass, Guts was likable, Janice was lovely, and even Markov was a very human-like antagonist. Whatever.