Giving Strayed the number one spot is a bit of a freebie. One or two other protagonists might debatably kill more people than Strayed does in the Old King ending, but their implied reasons for doing so are not "lol, lmao."

But even if you're not going for the Lil Stinker one, 4A's endings are, I think, somewhat bleaker than the average. It's Miyazaki's (first use of his!) go-to ending choice between traumatic change and a doomed status quo, but this might be the least kind he's ever been to both options ideologically.

The ORCA ending narration places immense weight on just how cruel Otsdarva's solution is, and how distant and dull the glimmer of hope you've bought with it--it promises a future for humanity, but immediately describes that future as a new age of war. Also, interestingly, our Liberal (derogatory) (in a leftist sense) Queen Wynne D. Fanchion gets the last word in both of these endings, her condemnation the final lines of diegetic dialogue.

But you have to, HAVE to shut down the Arteria plants; defending the status quo here is an imminently apocalyptic choice. The totally-not-climate-change situation is already bad enough that the only truly safe place to live is seven kilometers above sea level. They're not gonna be able to go much higher.

There's a real sense of Strayed's--and Otsdarva's, and Wynne's--despair here, three explicitly very young pilots stuck dealing with a gigantic, monstrous trolley problem created by the older generations. Perhaps it's no wonder one of the three ending choices is to just fucking snap and ruin everything for everyone on purpose.

Either way: dick move, kid.

Nexus is fascinating to me because my interpretation of the protagonist is that he's a fucking bore. Not a boring concept, not used boringly. A boring person. As much so as a robot-piloting elite mercenary can be, I mean. And, precisely in that banality, profoundly evil.

Nexus is a game with both a ton of plot and almost none, because the plot is breezing past you. Briefings being simplified contributes to it, as does how comically short and easy a lot of the missions are. Moreso than any other Raven, Nexus Guy does his job and goes home. He gets involved in a dozen plot twists and vendettas and schemes and conspiracies, but he gets exactly as involved as he's getting paid for and does not tug on a single thread of this tapestry of intrigue of his own will.

A recurring term in the series is that the protagonist is an Irregular; someone who acts on their own and disrupts the system. Nexus Raven is not an Irregular. Genobee might be, but you kill him while he begs you to care about anything. You become the top-ranked Raven, but despite your pure skill you're as much a complacent cog in the machine as the most milquetoast office worker. You sit comfortably in the corporations' pockets, not asking questions, for the entire game.

And in doing so you STILL DESTROY THE WORLD by pure stupid ass accident. Absolute clown. Fantastic.

SL Raven ranking this high is a bit complicated. The consequences of your actions in the main plot are some of the most straightforwardly positive in the series; you're doing basically the same thing as in AC1 and 3, but from the outside. You don't have that same ambiguity of whether humans will be worse off outside of the AI's control, because there already are a bunch of humans who broke free. Mind you, things didn't exactly get materially better, but there's no reason the people in the other Layered shouldn't get the same opportunity to wage pointless wars in the fresh air that you guys got.

But on the other hand... just on a mission-to-mission basis you're SUCH a dirtbag in this one. At times the casual attitude towards murder that pervades the game is almost overtly comedic. I mentioned it when I reviewed this but the mission where you literally just go stomp on cars to distract the cops while your client does a robbery really stuck in my memory. And I mean, in this case the protagonist DEFINITELY didn't actually know they were doing something altruistic in the main plot, the other Layered is basically a last-second twist. You're just trying and failing to capture a superweapon for the corporations.

So yeah, probably the most dickish of the purely classical style of Raven.

The tone-setter. Are you a mercenary thug with no loyalties or morals? Yes. Do you occasionally accept missions to terrorize civilian population centers? Also true. Does absolutely everybody understandably want you dead by the end of the game? No doubt, no doubt.

But I read the AC1 story, which would become sort of an archetype for later entries, as one that at least teases you in the general direction of redemption. Whatever your motives--it's very plausible that the protagonist never actually understands what's going on with H1 and Raven's Nest and is just trying to stay alive--the world you upheave is one that desperately needed upheaval.

Almost exactly the same guy as AC1 but I think the tone of the ending is a little nicer. More of an emphasis on humanity being free, less of one on the reasons an AI decided we needed turbofascism to begin with.

Technically you make so many choices about who to affiliate with and when in this game that it could in theory be extremely difficult to pin the protagonist down. On the other hand, I don't think it matters all that much beyond endings where you do or don't destroy the Internecine.

There's a certain dark absurdity to the behavior of every single character in Last Raven. I actually don't have an opinion on whether Alliance or Vertex is worse because the situation is so dire, politics seems genuinely irrelevant; the world is so thoroughly fucked and its military power is so thoroughly depleted, but the fighting not only continues, it's accelerated to a breakneck pace. The game taking place over 24 hours necessarily implies that everyone is double-fisting amphetamines and Monster Energy to stay awake while they speedrun an entire war, and you're RIGHT in the center of that insanity.

Nonetheless, you do prevent the final polish being put on the apocalypse, and it can be assumed that humanity doesn't go extinct. In some of the endings.

A strong entry in the "I don't know if this guy even understood what the hell was going on until much later" subseries. Our boy here doesn't care about politics or even money, he just wants some good old-fashioned revenge. I don't know off the top of my head if even a meager triple digit number of unrelated people die in the process, he's basically a saint.

He should probably lose points (gains evil points?) for growing up to be Leos Klein, but does that really mean you're evil in this game? I don't think so.

"the Dark Raven oooooooooooooo"

I'll be honest, the villain of Verdict Day makes a big deal about how bad this protagonist was but I genuinely wasn't sure if he was supposed to have a point. You kill an autocrat with a daddy kink and basically nothing else even happens in 5. I guess you start out working for Daddy and then defect because you felt guilty? So I think I have to put this one pretty low.

I don't honestly even remember what Leos was trying to do. Destroy Mars or something? I know he goes on a whole speech about how he regrets playing a role in the end of AI Fascism and thinks humanity needs it back so it's probably for the best that you Old Yeller him.

I'm open to input on this but I also don't remember a lot of 2 Protag's missions being more than the very basic background radiation level of evil. The corps on Mars are relatively good about murdering each other and not Everyone Else. For the most part.

The game ends on some really nice speeches about having faith in humanity and the future that--I mean you don't really---they could have been less earned.

This game feels like it wanted to do a lot more than the Tennish Actual Story Missions structure gave it room to do, but what we can see of the intended themes are definitely on the optimistic side.

Hey what the hell happened to Maggie, they pointed out her body wasn't found so I was sure she'd show up in the final battle but--oh, nevermind.

You basically just fight the most generic possible bad guy for the entire game, but it IS implied that you're only in it for the money. Somewhat jokingly implied, to be fair.

babygirl is sad and trying his best and I'm not going to criticize him just because he unwittingly assassinated a Neo-Archduke and started World War 35. the atrocities were not funny but they were somebody else's fault