Ryu Hayabusa and the Importance of Foil Characters

 

Ryu Hayabusa and the Importance of Foil Characters

 

I recently played through Ninja Gaiden 1 and 2 on the recently released Master Collection and I was quite surprised how bad the stories in those games were even for action game standards. And I get it, you don't play NG for the story and the devs of those games basically take the John Carmack Doom(1993) approach to story telling but at the same time, I feel like if they are going to have cutscenes, it tells me that they are attempting to have some kind of narrative, and I feel outside of brief breaks from gameplay, the cutscenes and storytelling in these games fail on a basic narrative level. For the sake of brevity, I'll get to the point of this piece. Ryu Hayabusa while having a great design and in some ways an interesting reserved, "man of few words" personality. He has no interesting foils to contrast him with to make these personality traits more interesting and as a result, every time he is on screen in a cutscene in these games, I often find myself bored half the time or just viewing the cutscene for the spectacle after just beating a boss.

I'll define a foil character for those who don't know, a foil character is a character is someone that highlights and contrasts traits with another character.

As overused of an example as this going to be and as much as I think he is an overpraised character. There is a reason why the Batman and Joker rivalry is so popular. Batman is a stoic, serious and at times angry dude while the Joker is happy, psychotic, and is insane. Both of them have poplar opposite personality traits that play off each other and create for interesting scenarios. For example, Joker can kill an innocent person while fighting Batman and laughs and acts crazy while doing it and this can bring out Batman's morals of not killing and push him ever so closer to losing his stoic demeanor and snapping but Batman never does because he believes that is a line he will never cross.

Now let's look at both Ninja Gaiden games, in NG1, who is a foil to Ryu? Racheal? She gets kidnapped and is a liability. Ayame? All she does is watch and narrate. Doku? He barely shows up and gets killed twice and barely has anything to contrast with Ryu. Alma? Same deal. Then there a bunch of other characters so forgettable(maybe outside of Muramasa) that they are almost not really worth mentioning. And that Murai twist of him being the villain the whole time was dumb, really, really dumb. The man is a trains people at day and is a secret Tyrannical Emperor at night? What?

Ninja Gaiden 2 does show some steps in the right direction with the character of Genshin being a rival of sorts to Ryu but the problem with him is that I am not sure what he really highlights about Ryu or what his motivations are. He just comes off as an obstacle for the player rather than a foil and the rest of the characters are as forgettable as the first game's cast.

Now to use a video game example on how to use a foil character and as overpraised as this game's story is, Devil May Cry 3 does use the character of Vergil very well for the purposes of narrative and gameplay. While Dante is loud, brash and obnoxious. Vergil is reserved, and stoic. It helps show highlight Dante's personality and makes it pop all the more. Platinum Games, even adopted this dynamic to varying degrees with their games like with Byonnetta 1 and 2, Metal Gear Rising, Wonderful 101, Anarchy Reigns, and even Vanquish to some degree.

While in NG1 and 2's cutscenes, it's usually Ryu talking to a bunch of characters with nothing really stand out about him.

To use another gaming example, there's a reason why Master Chief and Cortana's dynamic works so well. Master Chief is the quiet borderline mechanical super soldier while Cortana is the upbeat AI providing levity to the situations Chief is in. There's a reason why this dynamic works while Chief's borderline non existent interactions with the Arbiter don't. With the latter, Arbiter has little if no personality traits to contrast with the Chief and every time they are together, it borderline puts me to sleep with Marty O Donnell's and Michael Salvatori music the only thing keeping me awake. Cortana and Chief's dynamic highlights their respective traits more in Halo 4 where Chief is the machine despite being made of flesh while Cortana is more human despite being mechanical.

But back to NG, Ryu Hayabusa is basically Arbiter and Chief in Halo 3 but over the course of 2 games.

And before everyone starts jumping on me, I am not really asking for NG to be a well written story, I am just asking there to be a character to show off how cool Ryu actually can be as a character instead of being surrounded by boring cardboard cutouts. Maybe have a character whose motivations and personality contrasts with Ryu and make it less vague this time.

And I feel like I should address that stoic characters often get a bad rep but I think a good dynamic and a good foil can make them enjoyable and endearing characters.

I used to take foil characters for granted and while I did think they were important, I do realize their importance more than ever now in how the lack of them can make a story boring, intentionally bad or not.