I don’t agree at all with you guys about Shepard, but that’s a topic I’d write too much about if I tried to, so I’ll just stick to my own best and worst.

For my best, I say Labrys, from Persona 4 Arena. The story mode for that game was good by fighting game standards, but didn’t really become great until you saw her part of it. In the few hours I spent watching that, they made me care more for Labrys than I already did for some of the rest of the Persona cast, who I love to death and have spent literally hundreds of hours with between multiple play-throughs of each game. That is astounding. Her story wasn’t even original when you get down to it, and was in many respects predictable, but they delivered it just so damn well that it was impossible not to get sucked in and come to care for her. Watching her develop her consciousness from the first-person perspective, slowly going from being just an automaton to a fully sapient being, slowly thinking more complex, abstract, and independent thoughts based solely on the exercises she was put through and her interactions with another robot of her model who had a more developed psyche – there’s just no way for me to say how excellently her whole character and story were done there. Her story is also one of a small handful that has actually managed to move me to tears.

A runner-up I have to mention is Mordin Solus, from ME3. He was already the best thing about Mass Effect as of the previous game, but then he gets the single best part of the third game as well. Specifically, if you challenge him on his change of heart about the Genophage at the end of the Tuchanka story, his rebuttal to you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5MTPgjvaoA&t=1m15s . About the last thing you ever expect Mordin to say is “I made a mistake,” so him saying it here, and the way he says it, makes it a powerful statement, even before you get to his argument afterward. It’s the culmination of all his development during his loyalty quest in 2, where we see all the conflicting feelings he has towards the Genophage and his work on it. This is also one of the rare instances in a Bioware game where your companion acts entirely independently of you – defies you, if you try to the sabotage the cure (“Not your decision.”), forcing you to kill him yourself if you want to do that. And the result of that is so heart-breaking that I for one could only watch it once – I will never take that path again, even with renegade Shepards. Mordin, above everyone else in the Mass Effect series, deserves better.

For worst, that’s actually easy for me: the Duchess in Dragon’s Dogma. Dragon’s Dogma is a game plagued with poor writing in general, but the Duchess and her side-quests were particularly awful. They try and pass her off as having fallen in love with the (completely silent, no-personality) main character after just a brief meeting where you exchange only totally banal dialogue, and it instead comes off as her forcing herself on you. One of the first things she says when you arrive at her room to start her quest line is “you must think me a shameless harlot.” My own thought upon hearing that was “well, not until just now, but if that’s where you’re going with this, then yes.” And it doesn’t get better from there, as the writers genuinely try to pass it off as a story of love at first sight. Granted I’m very much so the wrong audience for that, believing the entire concept of “love at first sight” to be total bullshit, but still, it’s a particularly awful attempt at it. Especially when the Duchess decides that the middle of a mission where you come to rescue her from a mansion crawling with guards is the right time to stop and have sex with you. Yeah, real bright that one.