Guild Wars 2

I’m actually new to Guild Wars 2, though I played a bit of the original back in the day. I first met up with Scarlet during the Nightmare Tower mission, and right off the bat I couldn’t stand her. She was an annoying, boring “crazy-girl” archetype that seems to be popular nowadays, and the fact that she just monologues at you then teleports away at the end is just lazy, Saturday morning cartoon writing.

I actually went to the website to read up on her backstory, and kind of wished I didn’t. It is just awfully bad. She is definitely a Mary Sue villain, which is strange since I find that many of the characters in this game (at least from the main questline) are pretty good. Frankly, I can understand a lot of the grumblings from the older players here. If I had to put up with Scarlet’s super villain antics for a year, I’d be irritated too.

This situation kind of seems like the whole Lightning fiasco from Final Fantasy. A vast majority of FF fans absolutely despise Lightning, and yet Square Enix keeps making games about her. It’s very obvious that someone high up on the dev team is in love with that character. I feel the same is happening here; someone high up in Anet thinks Scarlet Briar is the greatest thing EVAR and refuses to listen to player feedback and criticism about her. Hopefully they’ll rework Scarlet to be less Mary Sue-ish, and we can get a villain that isn’t so pitifully contrived.