In my opinion, Abby from TLOU 2. During the first part of the game, she is portrayed as the bad girl, but when she become the playable character, you understand that she isn’t:
-Her father and friends were unnecessarly killed.
-She became pariah from her clan when she saved a member of a rival clan.
-She have been harschly tortured.
-She spared Ellie despite having occasions to kill her for understandable reasons.
I don’t get why many players didn’t changed their minds at the second part of the game, it’s so obvious that the real bad people are Ellie and Joël. Theres no problem about having sympathy for bad guys, but you must keep your critical mind.
And what infuriates me is that people even harassed the voice actress because of what her character did. Come on, guys !
Just want to point out that you can understand a narrative, or the point of the writer, and still dislike it. It probably wasn’t your intention but proclaiming that if someone doesn’t like X then he doesn’t understand it is a bit condescending; and kills any potential constructive discussion.
Personally I don’t think they nailed the execution. I already talked about pacing, but another issue for me was ludonarrative dissonance. It usually doesn’t bother me, actually most times I don’t even think about it, but in this game I was constantly aware of it.
On one hand, it tells a heavy handed story about how violence and revenge are horrible, on the other it has a fun gameplay that allows me to experiment with killing enemies in different ways to see how the AI reacts.
After I beat the game, I replayed the combat sections just for fun. The devs were probably also aware that they made good mechanics because I remember one of the cheats is having infinite bomb arrows. Me, walking around blowing up everyone like a badass, is definitely not the vibe that the writers were hoping for in their game, I expect.
Hopefully they’ll fix some of the issues the TV series. If they handle better the pacing, they’ll have a really good show in their hands