Really they need a deppresed teenager. He could even have his own statis problem called teenage angst.
Play FF8 and then tell us that’s a good idea.
Seriously, FF7 as well. Hell, any game lately. There’s always the angsty, mopey, reluctant hero. It’s getting old. I wanna see a guy who wants to be the hero. Maybe someone who doesn’t know that he’s the hero, but is happy to embrace the idea.
What about Grandia? Justin was enthusiastic about everything…
Vyse was pretty enthusiastic in SoA. Only character who didn’t seem to want to be a hero was Drachma, but he had the crotchetty old geezer hero thing going on.
Agreed. The cast of character sounds more like a therapy session.
Squall is angsty. Quistis is Bi-Polar. Zell has ADD. Selphie is hyperactive. Irvine has overactive hormones. Fujin has a speech problem. Raijin also has ADD. Rinoa’s the only one that’s pretty much normal.
And that’s possibly the scariest part of all.
There are already enough REAL depressed teenagers anyways. Gimme a break. 
Hell- Terra was an angsty motherfucker. So was Locke. Angst has been around since RPGs have had actual characters- and even then you could pretend that your Black Belt was pining over the loss of his dead girlfriend or whatever. =p
You’re right! It’s a great idea!
Spoiler: Squall is angsty. Quistis is Bi-Polar. Zell has ADD. Selphie is hyperactive. Irvine has overactive hormones. Fujin has a speech problem. Raijin also has ADD. Rinoa’s the only one that’s pretty much normal
hey is there anything bad about being hyperactive?! don’t insult my selphie!
topic: i think there are as much depressive and demi-depressive heros as happy ones
Heros tend to fit stereotypes too well. I just want a hero that is somewhere outside the scale of overzealous boyscout on crack and mopey litttle pansy. Hey, maybe a mopey hero who is zealously addicted to crack. Or a crackishly zealous pansy? A good three dimensional character is hard to find these days, they have gotten somewhat predictable. Why do they have to save the day anyway? Why can’t they just save themselves and happen to do a greater good in the process? And where is the cool, calm ninja kid who uses kung-fu and the hardest weapoon in the game to find, where it gets so bad that you can kill super-starmen without even a fight because you’ve been fighting SO MANY of them, looking for the characters ONLY weapon, but you never find it. Haven’t seen one of those in at least a little while, not without being given some loner mopey reflective bent. I need to go to work.
Man, GOOD call. We need more games like Earthbound, wow…I loved that game. 
I should play it again sometime. Also, Sat’s point is really a good one - I’ve been reading Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces (lolol coughNERDcough), but no, it’s really cool. RPG makers could definitely benefit from reading about the classical, archetypal hero’s journey, who’s wholeheartedly fighting for himself, his people, and for the right. It doesn’t mean they won’t encounter trouble and problems, or crises of confidence or dark nights of the soul, but through it all their “heroic” quality won’t be “whininess” but rather a constant, strong desire to fulfill his duty as a hero.
Well, Zidane was real upidity about the hero business…
I kinda liked the whiny hero, you know, like Tidus.
I kinda like Yuna, not just in sexy sence. I mean she is a hero or wanting to become a ‘dead’ one.
I think that the Luca chapter 5 quest is tells a lot about her soft side: Titus. She longs for him.
Big Nutter
I liked Evvan the hero from Grandia X-treme, since he hated his job, and everyone involved with it.
I liked Reid from Tales of Eternia, mostly because he was too busy thinking about food to realise he had to save the world. ^^
Try Summoner 2 (though you might want to play the first one before that). Not a stereotype angsty dude in sight, nor any whi,py women. The leading char is a goddess reborn spouting sarcasms everywhere and using necromancy just like healing magic, the second one is a human fish-thing assassin, and the third is an android from a chaos world.
Didn’t Suikoden also buck the sterotypes? I vaguely remember some woman in kick-ass heavy armour beating stuff up. :\