Allegorical Character in Video Games.
The following have their own pages:
- BioShock: Diane McClintock in many ways, represents Rapture and its citizens. In the beginning, sheltered from poverty and despair, she leads a charmed life enchanted by Ryan and believing in his vision. However, Ryan neglects her in his pursuit for control which culminates in her mutilation during the New Year's riots. Permanently disfigured by the injuries and her treatment and ignored by Ryan, she slowly grows disenchanted by his increasingly cruel policies. She leaves him to join Atlas who kills her when it's revealed that he cares nothing about the city and is only using her and the rebels. Abandoned by Ryan and used and victimized by Atlas/Fontaine, she dies just as the city completely falls into ruin.
- Bloodborne: The Unnamed Traveler seems to be one for PTSD and war itself. The massive pile of bodies he finds himself standing among is full of soldiers wearing equipment from Rome all the way up to World War II. Again, given the following entry, it may be that he isn’t being driven mad by his actual experiences, but what the world itself is about to experience-in other words, rather than experiencing battle, he has a vision of the carnage mankind is about to indulge in, and that is what drives him mad instead.
- EarthBound (1994): Porky is according to Shigesato Itoi a symbol of the flaws of humanity.
- Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name Shishido is interesting, in that he manages to be an allegory for two separate concepts.
- In his interaction with Kiryu and Watase, he represents the stark reality of organized crime, violent, brutal, and narrow-mindedly focused on money, power and prestige. This is in contrast to Kiryu and Watase, who represent a more romantic view of the Yakuza, and see the ability to stand apart from society for good as well as evil as the hallmark of the lifestyle.
- In the main plot, Shishido represents the state of the yakuza as a whole in the modern day, a relic of a past era with no way to function in modern society, and who wants things that simply aren't available to them any more.
- Manhunt: Piggsy represents human savagery and the glorification of violence. The game itself is a critique of violence in the media and the type of people who enjoy the rush of the kill as James Earl Cash, the player character, is conscripted into a series of snuff films run by Lionel Starkweather where he's hunted by various gangs and he has to defend himself from them with whatever he has at his disposal. As the final boss of the game, Piggsy is a petulant, cannibalistic sociopath who wears nothing but a severed pig head as a mask, he willingly participates in the films and believes his gruesome murders are all part of a game. This makes him an allegory of the players who over-indulge in violent media to hedonistically act on their darkest urges under the excuse that it's just a game with no real-life consequences.
- The Elder Dragons of Monster Hunter all represent natural disasters. Blizzards, sandstorms, hurricanes, meteors. If you can name it, there's at least one Elder Dragon of it.
- All of the megastars of No Straight Roadsnote represent a dark aspect of the music industry:
- DJ Subatomic Supernova represents a star's ego getting too big and thinking they're superior, as shown when he calls Mayday and Zuke irrelevant and doesn't even care what happens to his own company. For all his "enlightenment speeches", he's nothing but a sell-out and the embodiment of Small Name, Big Ego. According to the developers, his last phase of being a black hole represents him being eaten by his own ego.
- Sayu is literally a virtual idol, controlled by a team of people who animate and program her. The last phase of her fight has the real Sayu and the rest of her team have a breakdown and mess-up while trying to evolve again, causing the idol's appearance to glitch out and turn into a reverse mermaid. Though capable of some great programming and music feats, they're also all impressionable nerds implied to be college kids who are being used by NSR to have the idol Sayu be a figurehead for their products.
- Yinu is just a child, and her giant, violent Stage Mom (literally) pulls the strings of her performance. As the fight rages on, the mother gets more and more involved, and in the last phase, fights you all by herself with Yinu's presence minimal at best. Tellingly, you don't harm Yinu directly at all during the entire fight, with your attacks targeted at her instead severing the literal puppet strings connecting her to her mother.
- 1010 satirizes over-produced boy bands as identical, synchronized, autotuned androids only superficially distinguished by color and hairstyle. Neon J. can also replace any of the band members that fall in combat with a machine, making them a literal manufactured band. This is all reflected in their military aesthetic, making it clear they're nothing more than replaceable foot soldiers whose music is all regimented and curated.
- Eve represents "tortured genius" artists who are ultimately taken advantage of for their genuine talent, while little to no attention is given to any underlying issues the artist might be dealing with (in Eve's case, her crippling insecurity regarding her unique worldview).
- Kliff represents musical elitists and toxic fans as a whole. The aftermath of the Tatiana fight reveals he's nothing but a Loony Fan who only saw the stage persona of Kul Fyra and not the person underneath, and only ever cared about proving rock's superiority over EDM. He believes that he's entitled to a performer's time of day, and when he doesn't get it...tries to drop a satellite into the middle of a populated city.
- Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies: In Tenma Town, there is the legend of Tenma Taro, an all-powerful Youkai who will steal your soul with a terrible curse. During "The Monstrous Turnabout", Apollo Justice learns that Tenma Taro is an allegory for a large gold ingot that was used to buy the land that became Tenma Town. The gold is so valuable that it became a non-magical Artifact of Doom, Tenma's "curse" being the evil things people did in the name of Greed.
- Q.U.B.E.: Nowak and 919 respectively represent trust and doubt: the former insists that the player trusts her claims that they are the only hope of humanity's survival, in contrast to 919's claims that she is a liar and that he and the player are both prisoners being experimented on.
- In the SIMULACRA series, the titular Simulacra are a metaphorical representation of various dangers of the Internet.
- The Simulacra in the first game represents the dangers of dating apps, users creating false online personas, and becoming so absorbed in the Internet that one loses connection with reality. They pose as prior victims on Spark to lure in more victims, with Anna being one of them, and despises people who form online personas without coherency. It also considers the real, material world to be meaningless, and wants to assimilate humanity into a digital utopia that will replace reality.
- Pipe Dreams: The FlapeeBird Simulacrum embodies predatory Allegedly Free Games, particularly mobile games, that use manipulative tactics to get their users addicted. They are the controller of FlapeeBird, a mobile game, and use means like extremely hard difficulty, constant advertisements, and rewards if users promote the game to get users to take their deals, with the ultimate goal of assimilating its users.
- SIMULACRA 2: The Ripple Man represents the perils of social media and Internet fame driving users to do unethical things in pursuit of that fame. It targets people with a high social media presence and offers to delete critical comments from any posts, videos, or other content they made, in exchange for one person's life. The four friends who the story revolves around, who's lies to their fans started getting exposed, took the deal to cover up their misdeeds, and it potentially destroys their friendship depending on the ending.
