What does perfect Character Growth look like in gaming?

When I grow up...

Storytelling is a big part of my life and who I decided I would be, thus whenever it comes to telling stories and the mechanics and techniques that go into it, those are pretty much the topics that I go to sleep dreaming about. (I'm not exaggerating, I literally dream about this stuff.) Thus I love considering how to handle character introductions, struggles and ultimately growth, for all that makes for, in my opinion, the best experience for the viewer. Any story wherein the audience feels personally invested in the lives of the fictional characters is heighted by that bond, and it's in such a state where the storyteller has the very heart of the public in their hands to do so as they please. And for me, I particularly love that moment of comparing who the character currently is to where they started, the greater the disparity the better. (With some very pointed and clever exceptions at times.) As far as I'm concerned I think character growth is the bedrock of any great story and I think gaming serves as the perfect medium to serve up such stories, thus that's what I'll be touching on today.

In my experience I think that accurately portraying something as complex as emotional growth is one of the most complicated yet rewarding tasks that a storyteller can embark on. On one hand it can take a huge chunk of your storytelling time away from you, whilst on the otherhand it can make a scant 2 hour movie feel like an entire lifetime when laid out correctly. Oftentimes when it comes to movies or TV the biggest issue that plagues the storytelling is a lack of time to cover all the bases of telling in-depth stories with deep characters, which is why I feel we see a better balance of this in books where they are typically allowed to spend as much time as they need wherever they want to. (Of course, such room also provides a lot more space for the narrative to hang itself, but that's an argument for another day.) Games sit in that space between whereas they follow a lot of the conventions of visual media (mostly, I think those that break such conventions usually are my favourite, however) whereas they can have the breadth to breathe that you'd find in written media.

So what, then, does Character Growth in the world of gaming actually entail? Well I think that's somewhat of a difficult question to breakdown, because when you take into account the huge genre of RPGs and their mechanics it could mean a great many things. I mean if we're being as literal as possible, one might say there's a great chasm of growth in a story about a brash silver-haired 'demon hunter' who wonders about an old castle and gets impaled on a sentient sword, only to then go onto become the savour of the world several times over. Yet even then I wouldn't personally consider Devil May Cry's Dante to really be the poster child of great character growth. (Not knocking Dante or his games, they just have their own, somewhat immutable, style to them.) I'm more interested in the sorts of stories wherein characters will be an emotionally changed person from the moment that they walked onto screen to the moment they bowed off it.

And thus I think one of my main reasons for having this particular topic bouncing around my head is none other than the musical crime drama extravaganza; Yakuza. (or Ryū ga Gotoku, as I found out it is called in Japan, rather confusingly.) This game, or more specifically Yakuza 0, follows the journey of two men as they navigate their lives through this criminal organization and what it ends up making of them. Now where I think character growth really stands out in this game is the way in which the experiences and tribulations that the protagonists endure have such a marked effect on these people that you can literally replay the game and point out the different people and the way their mannerism ended up bleeding into the heroes. Now admittedly, Yakuza 0 had the benefit of being a prequel wherein the writers already had a clear idea on who these characters will end up being, but what appears to be a huge boon can actually be a rather constricting complication if you don't know what you're doing. (Just look at 'Solo'.)

To touch lightly upon spoilers; Yakuza 0 follows Kiryu Kazuma and Majima Goro on their early lives in the Yakuza as fresh-faced early-twenty year olds, before they first get entangled together into an endless web of conflicts and disputes. We meet a brash and somewhat unscrupulous Kiryu alongside a servantly and respectful Majima that are both thrown together in a journey full of lies, set-ups and, most importantly, manipulation from all sides. Yakuza 0 unfolds in a somewhat straightforward manner when it comes to character growth, by having these two literally run into people who they end up basing their future selves around within the story. Simple, but effective. By the other end of the story Kiryu comes out wanting to be rolemodel of an honourable Yakuza (as much of an oxymoron as that sounds) whilst Majime comes out putting on the persona of a unhinged lunatic in order to never make himself seem vulnerable enough to be manipulated ever again. As far as I'm concerned, these here are textbook examples of comprehensive and effective character progressions wherein the audience feels closer to both of these folk by the end.

Although to shift our gaze to another game which is renowned for it's character portrayals and yet handles it somewhat differently, let us look at Red Dead Redemption 2's Arthur Morgan. Here is a character that is cast in a tale that is already destined for tragedy, this story being a prequel to the first Red Dead Redemption. As for Arthur himself, he's hardly a fresh faced character waiting for the world to make an impression on him, he's a bandit that has lived a hard life and is already in a position that would be the end point for most characters. He's violent and cruel whilst also principled to an oxymoronic degree. And what makes his journey different is that he has become who he is by learning from the people around him, but where he goes throughout the course of this game is driven less by meeting new people and more by revaluating the one's that he's already known.

Once more I'll be fliting with spoilers but it goes rather like this; Arthur looks up to those that raised him to the point where he, despite his own common sense, believes and trusts his mentor when everything starts to fall apart. At the start of the story, events have just occurred to shake that belief, although it's only as things become more desperate that Arthur begins to react to it all and grow in kind. His journey isn't to become someone better but to merely learn about who he has been for a while now, what he then chooses to do about that is left up to the discretion of the player but either way his growth has been handled deftly. It's storytelling and character mastery like that which makes the Red Dead games so iconic and memorable.

Not all games handled character growth completely within their narrative, however, and that's where I think gaming has the potential to really surpass other Storytelling mediums. Take Persona 4 for example. That is a game which takes the concept of personal development and draws it out from the narrative and into the base gameplay. For the story you play a city boy who's found himself relegated to the country side town of Inaba with a whole cast of people he doesn't know and has never met before, rectifying that actually doubles as the way you become more powerful throughout the game. I mean that literally to, simply going around, talking to people and becoming closer to them powers up your Persona's whenever they need to be summoned giving the player a boost. This is, admittedly, a much more literal definition of character growth but I'd say it all fits.

RPGs in general provide great room for the player to feel that they're growing in ability as the character grows in personality, which helps in really selling the journey. Sometimes games can even work in little extra tricks that you might not even notice to get the message across, like in 'Spec Ops: The Line' where the performance of the actor intentionally became more ragged as you went on and the weight of the game's events began to weigh fully on him. Then there's what Cyberpunk is purposing to do, by having the player's animation become more defined as their stats improve in certain skills. That may sound mechanical, but any animator will tell you that the personality behind every animation informs the person it's equipped to, so this is actually a big deal in the narrative too. (If Cyberpunk ever actually comes out, that is.)

So what does Perfect Character Growth look like in the world of gaming, well a lot of different things. It's about nailing the character driven moments and taking their personality from A to B throughout the length of the story, but it's also about making the player feel more capable in the shoes of the person they're playing as. (Or less capable, depending on the direction you plan for the story to go.) It can be as subtle as changing the tonality of read lines to as complex as polishing several versions of dozens of animations, with the freedom of making a game there really is no limit. And all of that is just taking into account the very traditional games, whereas there are many games that defy even those definers. But ultimately creating ideal character growth is achieved by making the fictional real, and connecting hearts beyond the TV screen.