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Diegetic Character Creation - TV Tropes

  • ️Sat Jan 21 2023

As a holdover from their Tabletop RPG roots, many Video Games have the players create their Player Character by simply having them fill in a form-like character sheet: you pick out your Character Class, Skill Scores and Perks from menus, put together your appearance, then start the game once you're satisfied with your build. But in the interest of immersion and worldbuilding, some games make the character creation process an in-universe affair. Rather than simply entering the world of the game fully formed, you determine or "reveal" your character's traits through your choices even as you become acquainted with the world, actively interacting with it and its characters right from the word go.

The primary distinction is in the presentation. For instance, many games will ask the player to enter their name; the difference here is that while some give you a simple "Enter your name" text box with no preamble, others will provide an in-game justification to provide your name. Perhaps your character is signing for a package or logging in to a computer network, or maybe an NPC simply asks them "What's your name?"

Other aspects of customisation presented diegetically might include a Player Personality Quiz taking the form of a job interview or a psychological evaluation, or creation of your character's appearance being an examination on the results of a reconstructive surgery they took.

Pre-Character Customization Gameplay often accompanies this sort of thing, as does a Justified Tutorial. A Sub-Trope of Character Customization, naturally.

Examples:

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Action-Adventure 

  • Saints Row:
    • Saints Row 2: In Saints Row, the Playa is caught in a massive boat explosion and spends the next few years in a coma. As the sequel picks up, they've just woken up and are ready to have the bandages from their surgery taken off, which is where character customisation comes up.
    • Saints Row: The Third: The Saints rob a bank dressed like cartoon versions... of Johnny Gat, the most famous member of the Saints. The Boss gets unmasked when a SWAT ambush manages to capture them, and the subsequent character customization is framed as them partaking in a Police Lineup.
    • Saints Row IV: In the prologue, the Boss wears a complete black-ops uniform and their comms are malfunctioning. After they save Washington DC from a nuclear missile and accidentally crash into the oval office, they realize they like the idea and use their elevated PR to get elected as President. Character customization depicts their presentation on celebrity magazines, from which you can pick a template to further modify as you will.

Fighting Games 

  • Def Jam Series: The story mode of Fight for NY begins with a character creation screen in the form of a police report, where the player's character is designed as their physical traits being described to the police.

First-Person Shooters 

  • In the Borderlands universe, the respawning points are called "New-U" stations and are owned by the Hyperion corporation. Right after you step down from the bus and are given your ECHO device, Claptrap guides you to the first of said stations in order to "register your DNA" in the network.
  • High on Life starts with your sister doing a line of coke and hallucinating that your face is morphing, leading into the character customization. Granted, this is entirely Played for Laughs since the game is first person and you put on 24-Hour Armor before you even get a chance to see your own face again.

Platformers 

  • In Drawn to Life, the Creator (you) uses their powers to draw in aspects of the world. One of these aspects is the Hero, a mannequin whose basic framework can be drawn over with whatever designs the player can think of.

Role Playing Games — Eastern 

  • Bloodborne: The character creation occurs while player character signs their name to a contract in order to receive a treatment of "blood ministration."
  • Code Vein kind of starts like this; in the original intro, the protagonist was hospitalized after his squad ran into The Queen and were decimated, was turned into a vampire to survive, and then filled out registration forms that finally reveal them in third-person. However, this intro was scrapped and reused as a side-dungeon.
  • Dark Souls II: The character creation comes about from your character having their humanity restored via a human effigy, which prompts them to remember who they were as a human.
  • Elden Ring: One of the bosses, Rennala, Queen of the Full Moon, is capable of granting others "rebirth" through the amber egg she cradles. If you defeat her, she becomes the game's respec vendor, allowing you to re-customize your character in both appearance and stat distribution. It's stated that others reborn through her magic usually come out flawed and short-lived, but the power of the Great Runes you carry let you survive the process. Respec enough times and she'll actually thank you for letting her do it. (The Player Headquarters also lets you alter your appearance at any time, but this gets no diegetic explanation).
  • Many Final Fantasy games, prior to removing the ability to name characters due to the addition of voice acting, would present the option to name characters after another character asks for their name in-universe.
  • Fossil Fighters: The opening of the first game features a distant shot of the boat on which the Player Character arrives. On this ride, the player is asked three questions about what kind of dinosaurs they prefer, which determines which palette the player character will have.
  • In Let It Die, the player character controls a remote body shuttled in on a train while they are safely in an arcade. Thus, the game lets you choose an empty vessel to control in the game.
  • Persona:
    • Both Persona 3 (and by extension its remake) and Persona 4 justify naming the player characters as them signing a contract, which allows them to enter the Velvet Room and use its services in exchange for promising to abide by the consequences of their actions.
    • Persona 5: The game begins with the protagonist being arrested by the police and forced to sign a confession, which is how you choose your name; since this confession also asks the protagonist to "accept responsibility for their actions", it serves as a dark reflection of the contracts from the prior games.
    • In Persona 5 Strikers, the player gets to name the protagonist when Futaba asks everyone to download a new popular Virtual Sidekick app, EMMA, with the app asking for the protagonist's name after its installation.
    • Persona 5: The Phantom X: At the start of the game, the protagonist's teacher asks everyone in the class to sign their name on a future career/volunteer survey, which is used to name the protagonist himself.
  • Pokémon:
    • The series has a tradition dating back to Red and Blue of the game beginning with the local Pokémon Professor asking for the player's name as part of their introduction. Starting with Crystal, this has expanded to include asking for the player's gender as well.
    • In the first, second, fourth, and fifth (Black and White 2 only) generations, and their respective remakes, you also name your "Rival" in a similar fashion. Notably, in Gold and Silver (and the remakes), you name your rival via interaction with a police officer who asks for his name after your first battle with him, leading to the My Name Is ??? trope.
  • In Shin Megami Tensei V, you name the protagonist by signing his name on the student notebook he receives at the start of the game.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles X is the only Xenoblade game with a fully customisable protagonist. Later on in the game, it's revealed that every human character is a robot that can change their appearance. A player is locked into their first choice until they complete a sidequest that gives them a pod that changes their robot body.

Role Playing Games — Western 

  • In Dragon Age II, the character creation scene comes after Varric has told an exaggerated tale about his former companion Hawke, and his annoyed interrogator Cassandra demands that he start over from the beginning and give an exact description of what Hawke looked like.
  • This happens frequently in The Elder Scrolls:
    • Morrowind: The Nerevarine begins as a prisoner due to be released, and chooses their name by telling it to a fellow prisoner, and deciding appearance and skills by filling in some forms for Imperial census records.
    • Oblivion: After the Hero of Kvatch's prison cell is used by the Emperor and his bodyguards as an escape tunnel and he judges you as trustworthy, you choose your starsign after he asks you what it is, and choose or design your class based on one of his guard's guessing of it. Interestingly, the guard's guess comes after the player has moved through some basic exploration and combat sections—it's the game's AI monitoring how you've handled the earliest challenges and suggesting a class that matches your presumed playstyle.
    • Skyrim: After the Dragonborn is taken prisoner (noticing a theme here?) and led to be executed, one of the soldiers notices that you're not on the list and asks who you are, at which point the character customisation menu comes up. Also, outside of mods or cheats, the only legit way to cosmetically alter your face and hair after character creation requires to visit the Face Sculptor, an Altmer providing such a service in-universe (race and gender can't be changed).
  • After Bethesda Softworks acquired the Fallout license, sections like this began appearing in the series:
    • Fallout 3 is perhaps the most expansive example of this trope: the character creation process is the Lone Wanderer's entire formative years. Designing your face is presented as a gene projection of your adult self, choosing your primary stats is done by reading a children's book as a baby, and your skills are chosen via a career aptitude test in adolescence.
    • Fallout: New Vegas: The Courier begins the game waking up after surviving being shot in the head and buried in a shallow grave. Character customisation is presented as the doctor giving you a mirror to check that your face wasn't too badly damaged, and selection of stats, traits, and skills takes the form of an improvised psychiatric evaluation to make sure their mental faculties are all working.
    • The Tale of Two Wastelands mod for Fallout: New Vegas overhauls the game by adding the entirety of Fallout 3 worldspace, plot, quests, and items in New Vegas (the respective player characters are retconned as being the same person). The character creation process is almost identical to how it plays in Fallout 3, with the addition of traits selection (a feature missing from Fallout 3 and added by New Vegas) in the scene where your father (the Vault's doctor) gives you a medical checkup right before the aforementioned career aptitude test.
    • Fallout 4: The Sole Survivor's face and body are customised as they and their spouse admire each other in the bathroom mirror, including selecting which one you play as (i.e. whether you play male or female) by having them switch places to give each other a turn in front of the mirror, and primary stats are decided by filling in an acceptance form for the local Vault.
  • Mass Effect:
    • Mass Effect: If you choose to create a custom Commander Shepard, it's presented as the Alliance military database's files on them being corrupted and needing to be manually reentered.
    • Mass Effect 2: The game begins with Shepard dying, and then being rebuilt and resurrected. Customising their face (assuming you didn't import a character from the previous game) is presented as part of this process.
  • The Outer Worlds: The Unplanned Variable is chosen by Phineas Welles from the cryogenically frozen passengers of a lost colony ship. He makes a running commentary based on the statistics you choose, suggesting that he's studying a manifest looking for an appropriate candidate. During the game proper, additional generation options are given: the player gets the option of gaining phobias (e.g. a fear of heights or of robots) from frequently taking damage from particular sources, taking a small penalty in exchange for an additional perk slot.
  • Shadows Over Loathing: The character's class, motivation, and preferred pronouns are selected as conversation options when talking to various NPCs during the prologue. The appearance is chosen as the player character removes a newspaper blocking their face in front of a mirror.
  • Parodied in South Park: The Fractured but Whole. Different quests have you fill in headings on your character sheet for things like gender, sexuality, ethnicity and nationality by answering questions from NPCs. None of these have any impact on gameplay, but whenever you leave one of these quests, a truckful of rednecks will attack you for being "different". This encounter always triggers, even if you declare yourself to be a cisgender heterosexual white kid, in which case they'll angrily declare that they're normal, not "cisgender". Once you completely finish your character sheet towards the end of the game, one of the rednecks that attack you will robotically read off all the options you decided on earlier, resulting in this interaction:

    Redneck: Dang Cleetus, why you talkin' like that?
    Cleetus: Dialogue tree.

  • Starfield begins with the player uncovering a mysterious artifact in the mine they work in, which causes them to experience a vision and pass out. Later, when they wake up in the hospital, their coworkers ask them to confirm various aspects of their identity and life history to test whether their mind is still intact, which prompts the character creation.
  • Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic: Early in the game, your Force sensitivity is discovered and you are trained as a Jedi. Choosing which class your character cross-classes to is presented as one of the Jedi Masters interviewing you to determine which path within the Jedi Order you would be best suited to.
  • Ultima:
    • Ultima IV: In our world, a gypsy fortuneteller asks how you would decide several moral quandaries, to determine which of the eight virtues you value highest. That determines your character class along with the destination once you are transported to the world of Ultima. Ulitma V, and Ultima VI use a similar creation system, except that the class is already known and questions only determine initial stats.
    • Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire uses a simplified three question system for the three attribute combinations.
    • Ultima: Worlds of Adventure 2: Martian Dreams has Freud ask the avatar five questions. The first determines the sex, and the other four affect the stats of the player. Unlike the other games, there's no obvious formula, and requires a lookup table if the player desires to maximize stats.

Simulation Games 

  • Animal Crossing:
    • Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer begins with Tom Nook remembering what the new employee (ie: the player character) looks like before they're due to arrive, which allows you to customise them.
    • Animal Crossing: New Horizons opens with a first-person sequence where Timmy and Tommy Nook help the player prepare to depart for the island that the game takes place on. At one point, they ask the player to verify the information on their passport, which segues into a character creation menu.
  • The premise of Cute Bite has the butler character tending to an amnesiac young vampire; when the vampire asks what their names are, the player, as the butler, is invited to make up new names for both characters since the little vampire doesn't remember the old ones anyway. The vampire's starting stats are also determined by the butler telling her what her personality was like before she lost her memory.
  • How to Raise a Dragon: You determine your dragon's color and Breath Weapon by its diet in the first two parts of the game. The dragon's temperment is determined in the third part, mostly based on how much damage is caused.
  • I Was a Teenage Exocolonist: Sol's name, Bio-Augmentation, and Childhood Friend are all determined in the introductory backstory of their life in the Stratospheric, before the spaceship crashes into Vertumna. In the second run onwards, their favorite birthday gift, bedtime story, and most memorable moment with their childhood friend are also included in their backstory: the former two give you extra cards for the card-matching minigame while the last one builds more on their starting stats.
  • The Sims 2 allows you to change your sim's clothes at the wardrobe, hair and makeup at the mirror, and even their facial features and body by getting them plastic surgery using an advanced "automated plastic surgeon" device if one managed to unlock it.
    • The Sims 3 likewise did the same thing, though plastic surgery is available for everyone by visiting a hospital.
    • Averted in The Sims 4, where all of the above is done simply with a wardrobe and mirror.
  • Spore: This trope is essentially the entire point of the game, being a simulation of evolution. As you gain new body parts, you can use them to adapt your creatures to better deal with their environment.

Stealth Games 

  • Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain: Purposefully subverted, as you're asked to determine how Big Boss, now going by the code name Venom Snake, should look after having cosmetic surgery done to hide his identity, but XOF's attack on the hospital prevents it from actually happening. The ending reveals that Venom was actually a soldier who had implanted memories to make him think he was Big Boss all along. Turns out, the surgery was performed on him after all, and by creating a character at the beginning you were determining how he looked before his face was reconstructed to make him look like the Boss.

Tactical Role-Playing Games 

  • Midnight Suns justifies the character customization as the Caretaker giving Doctor Strange a clear vision of what Hunter (the player character) looks like to aid him in the initial resurrection spell. According to Strange, spiritual identity theft is no laughing matter.
  • Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen: Character creation takes the form of a Tarot Card reading conducted by the Warren the mage — he will ask you certain questions based on the cards he draws, and your answers determine the hero's skills and Alignment stat.

Third-Person Shooters 

  • Splatoon: At the start of each game, it asks the player to customize their character's appearance upon booting it up. The related post-launch Downloadable Content expansions do make things a bit more diegetic, however:
    • In Splatoon 2's Octo Expansion DLC, the player's Octoling is created by them first waking up in the underground metro station, met face-to-face with Captain Craig Cuttlefish. He then asks the player if they remember anything before they fainted, which takes them to the Octoling's customization screen, where they are naked in a green test tube, the player customizing their appearance based on the questions they are asking themselves.
    • In 2's Octo Expansion DLC, once the player has collected the third thang, Captain Cuttlefish asks them to help him put up a sign looking for Agent 3, the previous player character of Splatoon. This is framed by him asking the player if they remembered what Agent 3 looks like, including their gender, skin tone, and eye color, reflective of the more limited options in the first game, with Cuttlefish drawing out what they look like on a sketchpad. These details help determine what Agent 3 looks like when they make an appearance near the end of the DLC.
    • Splatoon 3's Side Order DLC has Agent 8 waking up inside a new world blanketed in white, who is separate from the main playable character, New Agent 3 (even if New Agent 3 was already an Octoling in Hero Mode). Pearl asks if Agent 8 has recovered from their injuries, with the flavor text of the questions being related to their appearance (eg. "What about a headache" is asked when picking Agent 8's hairstyle, "Can you see me" is used when choosing an eye color, etc.).

Turn-Based Strategy 

  • Jagged Alliance 2: While most of your mercenaries will be hired, you get a link to an in-game website called the Institution for Mercenary Profiling (I.M.P.) which says it'll give you a total analysis of your mental and physical state to provide an accurate profile, which ends up being the stats and traits of your created mercenary. Most of the information, such as numerical stats, is simply adjusted directly, but traits and attitudes are determined with a lengthy (and humorous) personality quiz.

Visual Novels