Vaan's Powerlessness Contradicts 40 Hours of Player Control

Bad protagonists don't kill JRPGs—misaligned narrative contracts do.

The complaint assumes a protagonist's quality exists independently of the game's design. But evaluating character writing the same way you'd assess a supporting cast member in a film misses something fundamental.

Take Vaan in Final Fantasy XII. He's technically a blank slate—a street orphan with no pressing agenda—yet the game forces him into an emotional climax about accepting his powerlessness and his brother's memory. You've been making his tactical decisions for 40 hours, then the narrative insists on a predetermined grief arc that contradicts the autonomy you've held throughout.

Persona 3 sidesteps this entirely by refusing individual identification. You control the protagonist's actions but not his inner life—the story belongs to the collective, SEES, the entire team, not to one person's arc. No contradiction between player agency and scripted revelation because the "protagonist" is architecturally different. The game's narrative design demands it.

The actual problem isn't character quality. It's the gap between the emotional journey the script wants to impose and the actual power the player has held all along. Some games bridge this gap brilliantly. Others ignore it. When you're designing anything that requires sustained engagement from someone else—a project, a team, a creative partnership—that gap determines whether they stay invested or feel manipulated. Make them complicit in where they're going, not passengers on a ride you scripted for them.