Videogames with the most fleshed out non-speaking roles?

[Chronicler]

So, in the idlegaming dating sim Crush Crush, there are these four "Monster" babes you can romance, and none of them speak. When you click on them there are an endless series of interactions.

You can go on and on like this pretty much all day. It's obviously goofy, not "High art" or anything, but there is a sense that this character has an internal life despite never saying a word.

Fate Grand Order has a similar mechanic where when you put a character as your favourite, you can click on them and have them say various colourful things to you. When you click on Hessian Lobo, the headless horseman riding a dog. What you get is this.

The character admittedly gets characterization elsewhere in the game but most of the places where you can look to learn a bit about him immediately after unlocking him are like this. Pretty much conspicuous blanks where other characters have their personalities introduced to you.

So I was thinking, what game do you think fleshes out a non-speaking role the most? It seems like there's probably a lot of different ways of handling it.

 

[Urdnot_Wrex]

I have to admit I have never heard of these games... the first one looks scary, do you actually have human females like that on your planet?

Seriously, I might be spoiled by some games, but nowadays I can't really imagine non-speaking characters to feel fleshed out to me, I think it's such a huge improvement to have fully voiced characters in games, they feel much more alive. The only ones I can think of would be the dog companion in Dragon Age: Origin (mine was called Fluffy), who obviously can't speak, but has quite a personality, and Wolgraff in Divinity: Original Sin, but he's only mute, he still communicates through signs and writing, so I'm not sure if that counts.

 

[Chronicler]

Truthfully most games I play without the sound.

Don't get me wrong, the first time you play, you wanna really soak in the ambience and such.

But when I boot up Baldur's Gate, a decade-long comfort food? When I dust off any of the classic Final Fantasies for old time's sake? When I log in for another grind session in some MMO I've got over a thousand hours in? Sound off, podcast on. Or maybe a letsplayer in another window. Sometimes get some Mystery Science Theater going. Point is I've got some show on and I'm not listening to the game.

 

[Urdnot_Wrex]

Fair enough. I can't imagine playing an RPG without listening, but that's probably because I have stopped replaying games after the revelation how many great unplayed ones are out there.
Even when I played Baldur's Gate games repeatedly, I wanted the sound at least in one ear, to notice an attack, hear the sound when you detect a trap or the call when a party member is badly wounded, and simply to "be there".

With games where nobody talks and everything is under control, like in HoMM3, I can play without earphones or listen to music or other stuff, because that's like playing chess, completely different.
I can't for the life of me imagine listening to a podcast while playing an RPG, that would be too distracting.

 

[Chronicler]

Yeah, there are a lot of great games out there for sure. As a teenager I was a very adventurous gamer. When I got my first job I used to buy one videogame every month, and play it from start to finish.

I don't tend to play too many new games anymore. Something about learning how a game works from the ground up is just more of a commitment than I'm ready for most days. Think Azure Striker Gunvolt was a real turning point. I remember being so excited about this game from the makers of Megaman ZX, and then I picked it up after buying it, and these characters were all babbling in fantasy terminology I didn't understand, and the tutorial was explaining confusing new mechanics to me, and I just never ended up spending more than like ten minutes on it. Kept telling myself I was gonna give it a proper shot when I was feeling more energetic and that day just never came.

Once I've got a bit of money I'm planning on doing Hollow Knight though. It's gonna be my first new game in a while. I've been watching this streamer play it so I think I've got a pretty solid idea of how it works in theory, though I'm sure it's all easier said than done. Doesn't feel like it's gonna be as big a commitment.

Etrian Odyssey might've been the last game franchise I was actively following the new installments as they came out. They just put out nothing but bangers, and the games are just intuitive as all get out. Never feels like you're learning how to play them, feels like you've just been set loose in a playground and you're running wild. But Nintendo decided they were done with Dual Screens so I guess the brief blip in history where an Etrian Odyssey Franchise can flourish has passed us by.

 

[Antimatter]

Companion Cube from Portal 1.



Cerberus from Hades.



And BB from Death Stranding of course!

 

[Urdnot_Wrex]

Companion Cube from Portal 1.

I can't believe I forgot about Companion Cube, shame on me.

 

[Nimran]

You know, I was replaying Golden Sun recently, and I rediscovered how fascinating some of the characters were. The villains in particular had a complexity to them that you don’t normally see in games made for kids. Granted, you had to play the second game to get most of the context of why they were doing what they were doing, but it still made for a good story. This game is old, and therefore doesn’t have voice acting, though the characters do make excited gerbil sounds when they have dialogue.