They Gave the Wrong Character the Crown: RPG Sidekicks Who Deserved the Spotlight

There's a moment in a lot of RPGs — you've played maybe ten, fifteen hours in — where it hits you. The character you've been grinding dungeons with, the one with the complicated family history and the morally messy worldview, is not the character the game is asking you to care about most. That honor belongs to the main hero. And the main hero? Kind of boring by comparison.

It's not a rare feeling. It's practically a genre tradition at this point. And here at KingMaker Chronicles, we think it's worth talking about honestly, because it shapes how you play, how you invest emotionally, and sometimes how much you actually enjoy the back half of a 60-hour campaign.

The Chosen One Problem

RPG protagonists carry a heavy burden before the opening cinematic even ends. They have to be relatable enough for a broad audience, flexible enough to accommodate player choices, and central enough to justify being the narrative anchor for an entire world's worth of lore. That's a lot of boxes to check, and the result is often a character who ends up feeling like a blank canvas dressed up in plot armor.

Your sidekick doesn't have those constraints. They show up already formed — with history, contradictions, specific opinions, and wounds that haven't healed. They can disagree with you. They can be wrong about things. They can want something that has nothing to do with saving the world. And that specificity is exactly what makes them magnetic.

Designers aren't always doing this on purpose, which is part of what makes it so fascinating. Sometimes a secondary character just grows in the writing room, accumulates depth through revision, and ends up walking into the final product as the most interesting person in the room — while the protagonist is still being sanded down to appeal to everyone.

Characters Who Stole the Throne

Think about Garrus Vakarian from the Mass Effect trilogy. Shepard is a capable, customizable hero, but Garrus has a complete character arc that spans all three games — from idealistic cop to ruthless vigilante to reluctant legend. His loyalty mission in Mass Effect 2 hits harder than most main story beats because the stakes feel personal in a way that galactic extinction, weirdly, sometimes doesn't. Garrus has a face and a grudge and a sniper rifle with a name.

Or look at Vivi from Final Fantasy IX. Zidane is the protagonist, but Vivi's existential crisis — grappling with the fact that he was manufactured, that his lifespan is predetermined, that he might not be "real" — is the emotional spine of the whole game. Players who replay FFIX aren't coming back for Zidane's arc. They're coming back for Vivi.

Closer to home in the western RPG space, Dragon Age: Origins is technically your Warden's story, but Alistair, Morrigan, and Leliana each carry enough narrative weight to headline their own games. Bioware knew this, which is why those characters kept showing up in sequels long after the Warden rode off into ambiguous legend.

Why This Happens — And Why It's Not Always a Mistake

There's a design philosophy argument to be made that a slightly underwritten protagonist is actually a feature. The idea is that a blank-ish main character creates space for the player to project themselves into the role. You're not watching someone else's story — you're living yours.

But that logic breaks down when the supporting cast is so richly drawn that the comparison becomes uncomfortable. If Garrus is out here having a full identity crisis about justice versus law while Shepard is mostly just responding to dialogue prompts, the projection fantasy starts to feel thin.

The more interesting explanation might be that deuteragonists get written with more freedom and more specificity because the writers aren't under the same pressure to make them universally palatable. A sidekick can be prickly. They can hold views the player disagrees with. They can be wrong and stay wrong. That creative latitude tends to produce better characters.

How to Reframe Your Playthrough Around Them

If you've identified a sidekick who's clearly carrying more narrative weight than your protagonist, you don't have to just accept that as a mild disappointment. You can actively reorient how you play.

First, treat every companion quest like it's the main story — because for that character, it is. Prioritize their missions. Read their item descriptions. Exhaust their dialogue trees. A lot of the best writing in RPGs is buried in optional conversations that most players skip in a rush to hit the next story marker.

Second, make choices that serve their arc, not just your preferred alignment. If your party's most compelling character is wrestling with a specific moral question, let your decisions reflect that tension rather than defaulting to whatever nets you the most karma points. You'll get a richer experience, even if it costs you some optimal outcomes.

Third — and this one's underrated — pay attention to how other party members react to your sidekick. NPCs and companions often have dialogue that contextualizes your deuteragonist in ways that deepen their story without requiring a dedicated cutscene. The world's opinion of your most interesting character is part of their characterization.

What This Says About the Games We Love

The fact that we keep having this conversation — that Vivi matters more than Zidane, that Garrus outshines Shepard, that half the internet would've preferred to play as the sidekick — isn't really a criticism of RPG design. It's evidence that the genre is capable of creating characters so compelling that players want more than the game is offering.

That's a good problem to have. It means the writing worked, even if it worked somewhere unexpected.

The real takeaway for players is this: the protagonist's name might be on the box, but the crown doesn't always land where the marketing team intended. Some of the best RPG experiences you'll have come from deciding, around hour twelve, that you're not playing the chosen one's story anymore. You're playing the story of the person standing next to them — the one with the better arc, the harder choices, and the more honest relationship with what the world is actually asking of them.

Rule your realm however you want. Just make sure you're paying attention to who's actually earning the throne.