Watch_Dog's protagonist is Aiden Pearce, angry white guy. Aiden is...grumpy. He talks through gritted teeth, wilfully threatens violence and rarely, if ever, seems to enjoy anything. He's a miserable, unlikable, monotone snooze fest, that on paper reads like a 13 year old's idea of what a 'bad ass' video game character would be - down to the fact that every single outfit you can buy for him is simply a take on the trench coat / baseball cap / bottom half of Sub-Zero mask ensemble. Doing things like wearing a bad-ass trench coat, riding a motorcycle, killing a hit-man or telling a bad guy 'how it is', does not a good character make. Aiden is such a flatline that you don't care about his family, 'friends' or plight, to the point that toward the end of the game's first act it was nearly impossible to figure out what exactly was going on within the context of the story - but somehow abortions, prisons, witnesses, and testimony find their way into a narrative that initially seemed to be about solving the murder of a six year old girl. Things do improve story-wise, and Aiden develops something resembling a personality toward the middle of the second act, but it sucks he isn't more dynamic from the start and that Ubisoft wasn't willing to take more risks with him. When they released Far Cry 3, they made Jason Brody and his friends deliberately vapid, coddled, soft and flawed so that people would have genuine emotional reactions to them. While some of those reactions were negative, you at least felt something, and by the end of the game you're presented with a choice that asks you to pass judgement on those same characters. Personable characters can save the most generic and worn-out stories, and generic ones can doom narratives like the one in Watch_Dogs which is about a lot of techie stuff and screams out for a character worth investing in from the word go, versus one you need to spend a lot of time with to truly get behind.
