LogFAQs > #965231617

Characters dying and coming back to life, and basically any time you do fake out deaths where you try to milk the emotions of a death scene where the other characters react like it was real only to pull the rug out from under it later. All it does is make me not want to bother paying attention to the story because I don't expect anything it shows me to matter, I assume it will just backtrack on anything serious/negative it suggests as a possibility so I don't give a shit. I realized just how sick I am of this kind of shit in stories recently when I played a game with an actual character death and I barely even acknowledged it until after the fact because I'm so used to seeing a character seemingly die and having it be just a cheap way to try to create drama without doing something actually dramatic.

Also silent protagonists are generally bad. The ones who get enough dialogue choices aren't so bad (I don't mind the Persona ones too much because while they do strain credibility a lot, at least they do say stuff several times in pretty much every conversation so it never feels like they're just total non-entities) though still not ideal, but in general the problem is silent protagonists break the world they're in by having no one respond to them properly. The whole "self-insert" thing doesn't work at all because they're still clearly pre-defined characters - they always do the same things, make the same decisions, have whatever nebulous personality traits make the other party members like them and their enemies dislike them, etc. They just don't have any of their dialogue shown so you don't get to see much about who they are, or in the cases of the ones who don't even get treated as if they are saying things you don't get to hear/see you're left wondering why no one around them ever comments on them never talking.