The 3rd Birthday just came out... and fans of Parasite Eve are livid. Not only has a revived RPG series been changed into a shooter game, but Aya Brea has degenerated into a moeblob. Even being voiced by Yvonne Strahovski who I respect as an actress doesn't mean that I'm liking the changes made to her character.
I've never gotten the appeal of playing as a weak character. Most people wanting to play a game do it to play as a strong, powerful protagonist. Nobody wants to play as a wimp and seeing a character that fans have wanted to see return for a decade suddenly become weak and pathetic leaves a bad taste in my mouth. If anything, this phenomenon is worse in gaming than it is in passive media since the character shown on screen is menat to be representative of the player. People have certain expectations for who they're going to assume the role of when playing a sequel and making a previously loved character unlikable will only cause the series to lose fans.
Two perfect examples of this phenomenon are Kung Lao from Mortal Kombat and Samus from Metroid. Kung Lao was a character introduced in Mortal Kombat 2 as a stoic monk who fights only out of a sense of duty to prevent Shao Kahn from conquering the world. When Mortal Kombat: Shaolin: Monks was released, Kung Lao became a snarky, obnoxious brat who was tired of living in Liu Kang's shadow. While Kung Lao had more personality than he had in the past, this contradicted everything that had been established about the character which the audience loved. Kung Lao may have had more of a personality but he was certainly lacking in any identifiable characteristics.
Samus Aran is an even more controversial example. Ever since the first Metroid, Samus has been seen as a stoic badass who was the inspiration for many of gaming's other sci-fi heroes, namely Halo's Master Chief. Yet, when Nintendo decided to outsource the production of the next Metroid game to Team Ninja, the new development team created a new version of Samus who's entire personality was the polar opposite of the character that fans had known for years.
The new Team Ninja version of Samus was no longer a strong independent renegade but was now a moefied submissive BDSM fantasy who I and others could no longer identify with, see as a strong protagonist or even recognize as Samus anymore. She was an overly obedient yes-woman who suffered from crippling emotional issues that she didn't have previously.
So if these changes are universally abhored by fans, why do developers insist on changing characters in fundamental ways like in The 3rd Birthday? Why do developers think that players want to play as ineffectual characters in action games which should ideally function as power fantasies? The answer probably lies more with bad writing more than marketers truly believing that audiences enjoy seeing their favorite character be destroyed.
There's a difference between a protagonist being emotionally vulnerable and being utterly pathetic. Solid Snake is a good example of a protagonist who was made more vulnerable in the series third installment that was a change for the better. Unfortunately, lesser developers thought that excessively whiny and occasionally inept protagonists were everything that gmers wnated to see and began creating characters that had all of Snake's (realistic and well-executed) flaws and none of his actual strengths. Hence why we get characters like Tidus and the Other M version of Samus just like comic book authors thought that adding in gratuitous gore and amorality would make their comic as awesome as Watchmen.
And yet The 3rd Birthday is even more problematic given that Aya is now a walking female cliche, powerless and driven by emotion. I happened to like Aya since she was a streetwise cop and now taking her personality and turning her into walking sexist stereotype is an insult to every single Parasite Eve fan who begged Square-Enix for a decade to make this sequel.
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