In games like Red Dead Redemption and GTA4, you're given backstory that Marston and Niko were pretty bad guys. Marston killing,pillaging, maybe sometimes even raping or letting his friends, and overall criminal scum turned family man, jerk with heart of gold. Niko fought in some war, killed people, maybe committed some atrocities, then he comes to America as an immigrant with a heart of gold. You're supposed to believe that these guys were terrible people, but it's almost impossible to hate them cause their present selves are too likable and you never really get a glimpse of their past other than expository dialogue.

With Cole Phelps I was just expecting a straight cop with a heart of gold come to clean up Los Angeles. But instead he was an opportunist, a studious college boy come to join the war in order to make a name for himself. He's an ineffective officer trying to apply his skills learned by the books and in school onto the battlefield and fails miserably on almost every turn, always grasping to gain control over the situation and his men. But in the present you have a crack detective pulling criminals off the streets and making LA a safer place. But you never get to the point where you're backing up Cole 100 percent cause you know he was a dick in the past and the game shows you it. You don't know what to think about Cole. Is he a good guy or a bad guy? Is he just trying to make a name for himself by solving all these cases or is he really motivated to clean up the streets?

And by the end of it you realize the deep shit Cole got his men and himself into and you just really hate the guy for it. But at the same time you respect him as a detective and all the things he's done to help make LA a better place.(Save for the Elsa thing, but I felt that part was really poorly developed and out of character for Cole ).

So what do you think of Cole? Was he a weaselly coward who didn't deserve redemption? If you think so, do you think you would have felt the same way had Marston's past flashed throughout the game? Destroying innocent families for greed while he seeks to live peacefully with his own?

Even if he was trying to honestly clean the streets, he did a pretty bad job of it. Half the guys he put away were innocent and he never challenged his superiors to accept that the cases were connected despite the ever growing body count. I didn't respect him as a detective. The guy is a self-righteous ass with little to back his claim to authority.

I still don't understand the assertion that Niko was a likeable guy. He killed just as many people as past GTA player characters, only he (sarcastically?) apologized for it afterwards. Maybe he wasn't downright evil, but he didn't have a heart of gold.

I still don't understand the assertion that Niko was a likeable guy. He killed just as many people as past GTA player characters, only he (sarcastically?) apologized for it afterwards. Maybe he wasn't downright evil, but he didn't have a heart of gold.

 I don't like Phelps. I think he's a cowardly, naive man-child with an underlying selfishness for every action he takes.

That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed his conception and execution. When I started the game and first saw Phelps' obsessive need to play things straight, I figured was seeking redemption for something he did in the war. That's a pretty standard trope, right? A guy goes into war with some kind of douchewad attitude, becomes the one-man idiot train that don't ever stop, and gets everyone on his team butt-plugged. Traumatized, he undergoes a personality shift and begins his long-suffering quest for atonement.

Then the flashback scenes started building up - and Phelps is depicted as his usual by-the-books, self-righteous persona. Lieutenant Phelps and Detective Phelps were more or less the same person, only back in the war he had a position of authority, so him throwing his weight around was visibly obnoxious whereas Detective Phelps had others to keep him in line. I, as the player, began to wonder where the character growth began. It seemed like there was none.

Then, Vice and half of Arson happened, and I realized that character growth was never on the menu - character decay was. Cole's personality shift spun the usual "redemption" trope on its head, because rather than him being a dick back then and a decent guy for the game, the opposite happened: he was a decent (though ill-suited for leadership) guy back in the war, and becomes a dick during the game. I mean, yeah, he screwed up a lot in his time as a Lieutenant, but those were mistakes made with good intent. In L.A. Noire we see him cheat on his wife for no apparent reason other than "she's purty and sings well". He never seems even slightly ashamed when others bring it up; hell, he just goes right on snozzing his new lady like whatever. His attitude towards his job is exactly the same as well. All this makes me believe that while he did join the police to atone for his mistakes in Okinawa, it was mostly for the wrong reason - so he could prove that he wasn't a complete jack-up and could actually do things right. Which worked...for a while.

TL;DR, I hate his guts. But I think it's really interesting that instead of the "jerkface who turned over a new leaf", he's more along the lines of "I have this leaf and I'm not doing crap with it until it turns dry and I can crunch it into a hundred pieces".

None of the war stuff every came across that well to me because they devoted so little time to it when compared to the rest of the narrative and they refuse to really tie it back into the main story at all until the very end.

So I didn't every really think he was a dick, Marine Cole and Detective Cole are almost two completely separate characters.

None of the war stuff every came across that well to me because they devoted so little time to it when compared to the rest of the narrative and they refuse to really tie it back into the main story at all until the very end.So I didn't every really think he was a dick, Marine Cole and Detective Cole are almost two completely separate characters.

I liked Rusty and the guy who played Dr. Fontaine. The rest of the characters were average at best, and Phelps is no Niko or John Marston. If they had not done the flashbacks it would have been even more stale.
It's a great game but characters are not Team Bondi's strong suit, I think Rockstar are still the kings of making great protagonists.