Favorite Silent Protagonist in a JRPG ?

this is just my personal fav , and thats Ryu from the breath of fire games. but others like Cecil, Cloud, Crono and the the persona main characters are definately strong candidates , juyst looking back at bof2 as my first real jrpg i cant help but feel nostalgic.

Whos your favorite ?

Brono.

They were never silent. They weren't even close.

I always liked Zidane Tribal.

I guess this also depends on what ya mean by silent.

No voice actor or that the player chooses all dialogue options?

Charlie Tunoku motherfuckers!!!!

@video_game_king: well yeh especially crono with that fucking split personality section ooooohmg .. its been a while since i played ff4 tho but i thougth alot of the exposition was thru other characters , eitherway both chars play like a traditional silent protag "most" of the time.

also i just thought of MAX , from shining force (pretty sure that was the default name) he doesnt even get to say yes/no he just nods and shakes his head

also .. subcategory of most annoyingly unsilent protagonist goes to tidus

I have to imagine the latter. Otherwise, any character before the Sega CD would count as silent.

That one dude from that one JRPG, aren't the majority of them silent

@excast: yeah .. yes/no choices , or personaish abbreviated answers etc ...but the character is otherwise silent , the best usually use some combination of sweatdrops and question marks as their only form of communication.

My favorite would be from the Shin Megami Tensei offshoot Digital Devil Saga. They do a pretty neat twist on the whole silent protagonist thing in that game

You're confusing characters at this point.

Charlie Tunoku

@video_game_king: yehp oops ... damn C names ... i meant cloud obviously

@envane:

Now you're just fucking with me.

Narukami Yu/Charlie Tunoku, mother scratchers!

oh yeah I'm totally on board with this.

@envane: hmnz whats confusing now ..

. . .

the main dude in Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne

uh, the protagonist in P4 isn't silent. you have dialogue options all the time in it....

Charlie. The main character in every Persona game.

I was always a big fan of Adol Christin (Ys) though it could b argued that he's not really silent. He never actually says anything (until the later games where he makes sounds like link) but there is an increasing amount of [Adol explained his unwavering resolve] and such as the series progresses. I also can't confirm that he doesn't speak in Celceta no Jukai as I am playing in JP, but you definitely make dialogue choices and the "green text" (a description of what adol is doing/explaining in the series) is far longer than any of the other games.

Then again I assume most "silent protagonists" aren't actually considered to be silent in-universe (barring Gordon Freeman perhaps).

how can you really have a favourite silent protagonist? Unless you mean in terms of fun options you get to choose? In which case probably Persona 4's.

@envane: I think you are seriously confusing yourself to what a silent protagonist is. Cecil and Cloud have lots of dialog, Crono is actually a fully silenced character (save for one line in one of the endings) and the Persona 3/4 MC’s are somewhat silent (they have no dialog per se but the do communicate with others)

So like somebody else said do you mean silent as not having any VO or not having any text lines at all?

@oscar__explosion: no im not confused ... i mistakenly thought that cecil had none , just attributed all the exposition to the other chars , and i say cloud acts like a silent protaganist except for certain points , but the qualities im looking for are things that the developers managed to do with the limited interaction available that makes you feel immersed. i dunno , not the sheer amount of activities you can do with them.

I'm becoming less and less of a fan of the silent protagonist archetype, but I am fond of Rudy from Wild ARMs. He might not have said anything, but his back story was pretty all right.

The nameless protagonist of Dragon Quest V is one of the best examples I've seen of a silent protagonist. Without saying a single word, I felt like I could sympathize with him far better than most of the talking protagonists out there. And the reason is because we observe him growing up from childhood into adulthood, in times of happiness and sadness, giving us an idea of how he might be feeling in certain situations without ever hearing a single line of dialogue from him.

Adol. He kinda just bumps into things and stabs them.

Minako/FeMC from Persona 3 Portable

It's Persona 3 Protagonist AKA Minato Arisato. Why? Can't explain why.

I don't know if I can consider having dialogue options as "silent"; your character is obviously saying something if you pick a dialog option and people respond to it. It would just be repetitive to pick an option and then read the text of whatever the character says. If they're voiced, it's a slightly different story.

Ness.

He took down an entire police force.

Garrett in og Golden Sun

Silent protagonists are terrible in JRPGs (and most other games to be fair), Crono's character design may be endearing but that doesn't solve the game essentially not having a hero to speak of as a result. Chrono Trigger would be an incredible game if Frog was the main character, or if Magus was the main character, or Lucca (makes the most sense), or Robo, or possibly even Marle (tough sell), but with Crono the narrative is just so disjointed and disparate.