Likable characters are an incredibly important part of any story (be it a Video Game, Book etc), I will caution here that when I refer to a character being likable I don’t mean them being likable as in nice I mean that the person reading/playing/watching is happy to see them show up in a particular scene

I don’t just mean the hero’s either if your villains don’t have something which can attract you to them and are going to be an actual presence in the story then they just aren’t going to be very good (or believable). Obviously you get around this by never actually showing the villain (Sauron in the Lord of the Rings for example) in any major capacity.

I think this is one of the great failings of many stories, if I absolutely loathe a character I don’t care what happens to them and thus any part of the storyline revolving around them is just going to seem like drivel to me. because I have no investment in what is happening to them.

If we take Final Fantasy IX as an example and compare the two main villains of the piece; Garland and Kuja, these two are vastly different characters and you can see why Kuja is one of the most beloved villains of the series. He is enigmatic, and has a kind of twisted charm about him, he is a cultured man and when he realises his own mortality and that knowledge tears his mind apart causing him to obliterate Terra it is one of the most powerful moments in the game despite having only a peripheral involvement of any of the protagonists. Then we take Garland, a robotic character who is evil and although having a large amount of game time concentrating on him did nothing to draw me in to his story, to care about his fate at all other than as an obstacle in the path of the characters.

Having a generic hero who isn’t particularly likable is a lot easier to get away with because people find it a lot easier to identify with someone who isn’t spending his off time kicking puppies or feasting on the souls of the dead or whatever, it does however help to separate a good story from a great one.

So what makes a character likable? It is a combination of things, and rather individual to the person.

How the character is shown and described both in physical appearance as well as body language is imperative as well as how well that fits to their personality.

How does the character act towards others, what make the other characters react they way they do? Is the character charming? prideful? reserved? wrathful? all these things (and others but you get the idea) have their place and it is a careful balancing act for the writers to make them believable but still make them stand out as an individual. You can’t just stick something in and call it an ancient evil and be done with it because if you do you get final bosses like Borderlands which make no sense and leave your players thinking “What The Fuck! that was dumb as shit”.

In today’s world of Voice Acting how the character sounds is almost as important as the writing, try not to be like Final Fantasy XIII’s Vanille and make me want to cut my own throat every time they speak, or in the worst case Final Fantasy X’s Tidus who is supposedly a heroic badass as well as sounding like a whiny 15 year old acts like a whiny 15 year old with daddy issues.

Do you have a hated character? or one you particularly love? If anyone is actually reading this I would be interested to know in the comments.