Best video game protagonists

Link▲ Rising

He's died as a child in a temple of time, become a wolf, sailed a cartoon ocean, and fallen from the sky, yet the silent hero's throughline is always the same triumphant pull of the Master Sword from its pedestal. Breath of the Wild reinvented him yet again, waking amnesiac in a ruined Hyrule and rebuilding an entire open-world genre around his blank-slate curiosity. The argument against him is his own greatest asset: he's a vessel players pour themselves into, which is either the ultimate cop-out or the ultimate design trick.

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Mario▲ Rising

A mustachioed plumber jumps on a turtle in 1985 and single-handedly proves video games could be more than blips on a screen, launching a franchise that's sold half a billion units and defined 3D movement forever with Super Mario 64's camera-and-analog-stick revolution. He's the Mickey Mouse of gaming—simple, silent, endlessly adaptable—and that ubiquity is exactly why purists argue he's more mascot than character, less an arc than an institution.

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Kratos▲ Rising

He butchered the entire Greek pantheon in a fog of ash-white skin and blood vengeance, then God of War (2018) blew up that persona entirely, recasting him as a grieving, guilt-wracked father teaching his son Atreus to hunt in the Norse wilderness. The single-shot camera and 'boy' callback became one of gaming's great character rehabilitations, transforming a one-note rage machine into something genuinely tender. Few protagonists have pulled off a total reinvention this successful, which is the whole case for his spot here.

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Master Chief▲ Rising

Master Chief cracking open his helmet-less faceplate was never the point—his mystique came from staying locked inside that green armor while Cortana's voice in his ear did the emotional heavy lifting, most memorably in Halo 3's 'Finish the Fight' campaign that closed out the trilogy and defined a console generation. He turned the stoic supersoldier archetype into a genre cornerstone and made Xbox a household name overnight. Critics call him a cipher for jarhead power fantasy, but few protagonists have carried a franchise's entire cultural weight on shoulder pads alone.

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Samus Aran▲ Rising

The moment you finish Metroid and the credits reveal the armored bounty hunter is a woman remains one of gaming's most quietly radical twists, decades before industry conversations about representation caught up. Super Metroid's tomb-quiet planet of Zebes—the isolation, the score, the search for meaning in scrolling explored map—invented the 'Metroidvania' genre outright and made silence itself a character trait. She's a founding mother of gaming as much as a protagonist, which earns her the spot even with a filmography that's given her comparatively little dialogue to work with.

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Lara Croft

Before she was rebooted into a scrappy survivor scrambling up cliffs and crying in the mud of a 2013 shipwreck, Lara Croft in her polygonal 1996 debut was already smashing the door open for female leads in an industry that assumed only teenage boys played games. She became a genuine pop-culture icon—magazine covers, a Angelina Jolie movie, an entire tomb-raiding subgenre—proving a woman could anchor an action franchise as a swaggering explorer, not a sidekick. The rebooted trilogy's raw physical vulnerability gave her actual interiority, finally matching the icon to the person.

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Arthur Morgan

Arthur Morgan spends Red Dead Redemption 2 slowly discovering he's dying of tuberculosis while the outlaw gang he loves rots morally around him, and that ticking clock turns every small kindness—paying off a widow's debt, sparing a stranger—into something devastating. His quiet, mud-streaked death on a mountaintop at sunrise, giving his last moments to either greed or grace, is one of the most purely earned endings in the medium's history. He's proof a newcomer can leapfrog decades-old icons purely on the strength of a single, note-perfect character study.

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Geralt of Rivia

A monster hunter who mutters 'hmm, interesting' while wading through moral swamp water, Geralt spends The Witcher 3 searching for his adopted daughter Ciri across a war-torn continent where every choice—sparing a wraith, judging a village's witch hunt—refuses to resolve cleanly into good or evil. His gravelly indifference masks real tenderness for Yennefer and Ciri, and that tension between professional detachment and quiet devotion made him the face of 'mature' fantasy RPGs done right. He earns his spot by making moral ambiguity feel lived-in rather than performative.

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Solid Snake

Snake crawling through Shadow Moses while Psycho Mantis reads your actual memory card and comments on your save files is the moment stealth gaming became genuinely theatrical, a fourth-wall trick nobody had dared before. Across the Metal Gear Solid saga he aged from cocky infiltrator to a man literally rotting from genetic engineering, wrestling with legacy, cloning, and endless war in cutscenes that ran longer than some films. He's the protagonist who proved games could be auteur cinema, even if Kojima's philosophizing occasionally buried him under codec-call monologues.

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Cloud Strife▼ Falling

Cloud spends Final Fantasy VII slowly unraveling as a fabricated identity crumbles, revealing the false-memory mercenary underneath the SOLDIER swagger, culminating in Aerith's death—a single scripted moment that traumatized a generation of players and became shorthand for 'games can genuinely gut you.' His arc from delusion to accepting a stolen, borrowed self remains one of RPG storytelling's boldest swings, executed through blocky PS1 polygons that somehow still land the emotional gut-punch. He's the poster child for JRPGs breaking into mainstream Western consciousness, sword bigger than he

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