JRPG Character Clichés - Really That Bad?

One of the biggest complaints about any JRPG made in the last decade (or more?) is that much of the time the characters are cliché. The male protagonist is a fatherless boy who falls in love with royalty, or he's a member of royalty himself and denounces his heritage or goes off on an adventure against the will of his family. The female protagonist is usually an important person - a member of royalty, a summoner, a well-regarded person in her community. No matter what it is, she always has some important aspect of her being that makes her hard to get for the male protagonist.

You also have other characters with highly cliché back stories. A thief, a funny boy/girl, that moe-themed ditzy female character, a well endowed female with a severe lack of clothing who is typically mysterious when you first meet her, the tortured soul who barely speaks and thinks that everyone is out to get him. The list goes on. Its possible that characters do not initially make up these archetypes, but certain personality traits and story elements relating to the characters usually fit into these broad categories.

All that aside, I'd like to focus on the typical "commoner complex" that more than a few main protagonists exhibit. This is a character back story cliché where they live in a simple village, usually with a single parent (the mother seems prominent here) or no parent at all, live a very simple life, have some wild dream of doing something important some day and, in most cases, have some sort of friend in the village that shares that dream or the early adventuring exploits of the protagonist.

Why is this such a common theme in JRPGs? The answer to that is simple - we, as gamers, can relate to that setting or one similar to it. Think about it. Many fantasy RPGs are based in a pseudo-medieval world and, in these especially, you see the above main protagonist cliché. The majority of people living in cities and villages in this time period on Earth were common folk. They weren't royalty, they weren't important in some way, they were common, everyday people, simple people, poor, not a lot going for them. If you were in that position, wouldn't you have big dreams that, in your mind, wouldn't be very attainable?

Carry that down to our time period here in the real world. The majority of people are middle- or lower-class citizens, we work blue-collar or lower white-collar "normal" jobs. We aren't CEOs, we aren't royalty, we aren't famous. We sometimes have dreams that are bigger than ourselves and are in many cases unattainable.

The bottom line is - these clichés are there because we relate to those types of situations on either a conscious or subconscious level. Are they over-done? Yes. Do gamers get tired of them after a while? Sure. Do they still have a place in the modern-day JRPG? Absolutely, perhaps even more so with the present state of the world's economy. No matter how much time goes by, the majority of people playing these games will still be able to relate to that simple "commoner complex" cliché more than just about any other back story created for the protagonists we follow for hours on end. And, because of that, these clichés will never cease to be found in our JRPGs. Sure, the circumstances surrounding the characters may be different, but at the heart we see these things because the developers know that we can relate to those types of characters. Are they wrong?

[Disclaimer: Nowhere did I say that all JRPG characters exhibit the above clichés, nor did I say that people can't relate to other types of characters. Just thought I'd clear the air.]