AMNESIAC PROTAGONIST
A video game protagonist with retrograde amnesia is such a common trope, it can’t even be called a cliche anymore- it’s far beyond that by this point. It’s actively annoying, thanks to its unoriginality. It’s so overused that the moment you see an amnesiac protagonist, you can’t help but groan. Breath of Fire IV, Lost Odyssey, Fire Emblem: Awakening, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Planescape: Torment, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Xenogears are just a few of the many, many games that have featured an amnesiac protagonist. And sure, sometimes that can actually work well – even in a few of the games that were just mentioned – but more often than not, it’s little more than a lazy plot device, existing just so that all the explanatory exposition that the game intends to dump on the player can make sense in context of the story. And even if it were not a plot device, the sheer overuse of the concept has turned off countless people from it.
