Kevin John blogs about the concept of "silent protagonists". He discusses the good, the bad and his overall thoughts about characters and speech. Check out the source to read about the games that do it right or do it wrong.

Video game designers have been throwing around whether protagonists should talk or not ever since characters began to speak at all. In many game franchises the main character never speaks, even if everyone else around him does. In Super Mario RPG this is even used as a comedic device. In the early generations of games there was hardly any dialogue, and when there was it was never spoken by the protagonist. Of course, few games from the NES era could have what you would consider "memorable" stories.

Now that voice acting is commonplace in games we come to expect all the major characters to have dialogue, including the one you play. The problem with that, of course, is portraying a person you would not want to help out in the first place.

Dark Arcanine via crispygamer.com »