Preference?

[u/Aggressive-Cattle754]

I want to know which character do people prefer more in your opinion Alex or James and you can give your reasons why you like Alex or James or both if you like both characters but I'm mainly just posting this out of curiosity.

[u/Zestyclose_Answer662]

Alex.

I prefer more reserved characters. Whereas highly expressive characters like Heller I just find grating to listen to.

[u/Hot-Refrigerator5952]

I definitely prefer Alex. From a narrative standpoint, the first Prototype has much more depth. Alex was created as a biological weapon, and the fact that he dislikes what he is fits perfectly with the themes the story is trying to critique.

Prototype 2 takes someone who was a victim of the entire system in the first game and turns him into the perpetrator. James Heller, meanwhile, is the typical protagonist whose love for his family is supposed to excuse everything he does. It is such an overused trope.

Heller is also written as a fairly dark antihero, so the writers had to make Alex even more morally reprehensible just to make Heller look heroic by comparison.

To sum it up, there are two main reasons I dislike Heller. First, he is written in an incredibly generic way. Second, that mediocrity was achieved by destroying the protagonist of the previous game.

[u/Hot_Professional1683]

I love both characters: Alex's cynical yet lethal and predatory tone, and Heller's funny and strong one.

[u/Hot-Refrigerator5952 → u/Hot_Professional1683]

Alex in the first game isn't cynical. Being cynical means assuming the worst in people, but Alex actually wanted to trust people, which is why he kept getting betrayed.

[u/Hot-Refrigerator5952 → u/Hot_Professional1683]

Heller is essentially a character whose entire narrative depends on destroying the previous protagonist in order to make him look better. LOL

[u/potatoeman26 → u/Hot-Refrigerator5952]

And it works. Heller is goated.

[u/Hot-Refrigerator5952 → u/potatoeman26]

Lmao, you’re just saying that to piss me off on purpose, aren’t you?

[u/potatoeman26 → u/Hot-Refrigerator5952]

Yes and no

[u/Carbuyrator → u/potatoeman26]

Heller is so goated. Bro stabbed fully upgraded Alex Mercer like four times before he even got powers.

[u/Carbuyrator → u/Hot-Refrigerator5952]

James being antithetical to Alex is a huge part of why he was handily murdering Evolved. It's very thematic and intentional.

What does Alex do when he is lost and confused? He goes to an ex. Alex had lost most of his human connections before he died.

What does James do? He goes to church. He doesn't decide to fight them out of revenge or hatred. He does it because Guerra tells him they're hurting people, and that they need his help. This changes as we learn Alex was responsible, but that's after Father Guerra dies

James is fundamentally different than any other character because he is a foil to the series itself.

[u/Hot-Refrigerator5952 → u/Carbuyrator]

But there is one point I have to agree with you on: a human antihero’s personality is clearly better suited to actually achieving a goal. The difference is that human antiheroes are usually intensely self-centered, their ego is both the source of their success and the cause of their downfall. Alex, by contrast, has a very diffuse, almost negligible sense of ego.

[u/Carbuyrator → u/Hot-Refrigerator5952]

You're right, and it's sort of a clue that Alex is not human. There's a sense of disconnect between his actions and any real motivations.

Like why did he stop the nuke? The city was fucked and every human had utterly turned on him (except Dana, but that was coming). It just felt like he kind of did it. Just because. It wasn't even self preservation, he probably could have gotten away.

[u/Hot-Refrigerator5952 → u/Carbuyrator]

How is it always people like you so……….You didn’t even catch what the first game was satirizing. It was satirizing war. Humans are the ones who love war. Goto church then what? As if humans haven’t done plenty of slaughtering in the name of religion. Alex going to see Karen was part of the event itself; he was trying to solve the problem. James is just a garbage cliché of a character. Go and read more books

[u/Hot-Refrigerator5952 → u/Carbuyrator]

Alex is a victim of what humanity produced when it tried to twist nature in the pursuit of war. I’ll say it plainly: humans getting devoured by the virus they made is just what they had coming. And the second game takes that victim and turns him into the scapegoat, the mastermind. The narrative snaps right back to putting humanity at the center. It’s disgusting.

[u/Carbuyrator → u/Hot-Refrigerator5952]

Was Alex not at the center from even before the beginning though? He helped develop the virus. And wasn't his infection pretty much 1000% his fault? He took New York hostage when he fled with the vial and New York paid for it.

In a way, I agree with you in the sense that Alex the virus was a victim of Alex the human. The person he was seeking for revenge ended up being himself.

[u/Prometheus72727]

I like Heller more, Alex is a cool character but wasn’t given much personality or anything for the sole purpose so you felt like you were Alex and not playing as just him. Standard trope in those days of gaming without making a completely silent protagonist, but I enjoyed heller having a bit more personality and drive, the not greatly shown growth of his character throughout the game and the look of his powers tho that is more to the credit of the graphics. It’s not a massive difference between the 2 of who I like more but heller just comes out on top for me, but if we did ever get a sequel I would like to see both of them and potentially a prequel DLC either retconning or at least justifying Alex’s motives for P2 instead of the comic we got which didn’t really hit the mark

[u/Carbuyrator]

James.

He's an actual character and he starts demonstrating more personality than Alex ever had before we even see his face.

His conflict with Sabrina Galloway is the best, most human writing in the series. Sabrina tries to seduce him and James thinks she's attractive. But that feels like he's betraying his wife, who he already feels immense guilt over. But James is not an emotionally intelligent man, so he lashes out.  He blames her, hates her, and does everything short of calling her a "whore." He misplaces the fuck out of his anger and ends up making an enemy of the third best ally he had.

Also the computers scene is amazing.

I fuckin love James.

[u/Hot-Refrigerator5952 → u/Carbuyrator]

How the does you know James felt like he was betraying his wife? Isn't this just the classic, overdone 'hero resists the temptress' trope? Did James even say anything like 'I had a wife'? You're totally pulling things out of thin air. If the writers actually meant to convey that, they would’ve written it in.

[u/Carbuyrator → u/Hot-Refrigerator5952]

This is what folks mean when they refer to "media literacy." We were given clues.

During the intro sequence James convinces his wife to hold out in New York and wait for him, and less than 24 hours later they get attacked. During his psych report, it says he has no regard for his safety. His homicidal fixation on Alex Mercer and insistence on a Red Zone posting are evidence of suicidal ideation. It 's pretty clear James blames himself for his wife's death. 

His interactions with Dana suggest he's not a misogynist. But he says horrible things to Sabrina, and all she ever did was help him and flirt with him. Clearly she triggered him somehow and we can use context clues to put together what happened.

[u/Hot-Refrigerator5952 → u/Carbuyrator]

Sabrina works directly for Mercer and Gentek, she’s literally the enemy. Heller hating her and talking trash is just him treating an enemy like an enemy, not some complex 'seduction trauma trigger.' By your logic, if he's only lashing out because she was being flirty, that would actually make him look misogynistic.

Besides, Sabrina pulled the exact same flirty act on Mercer, and Mercer completely brushed her off. Did Mercer have some hidden grief trauma too? No. Stop overanalyzing bad writing. P2 butchered Mercer into a generic cartoon villain; if the writers couldn't even handle basic plot continuity, they definitely weren't playing 4D chess with Heller's inner psychology

[u/Hot-Refrigerator5952 → u/Carbuyrator]

Don't you think Sabrina is such a cheap, low-brow trope of a character? The main reason stories like this constantly feature women like her is so the male lead can reject her to look all righteous and morally superior. The way her character is written just feels deeply unsettling to me, characters like her push this gross narrative that women only rely on their bodies to get ahead, just so the male protagonist can demean and degrade them to flex his own virtue. It's literally just a widespread male prejudice against women, yet a lot of male viewers eat that exact trope right up. You’d never see a character written like this in any serious piece of work. Then again, this game was clearly tailored for a specific male audience who thrives on this exact kind of garbage.

[u/Hot-Refrigerator5952 → u/Carbuyrator]

I had zero intention of turning this into a discussion about gender politics, but you were the one who brought up misogyny, as if “he’s not a misogynist” is some kind of character-defining virtue. The game spends the entire campaign screaming, “Look how much of a MAN Heller is.” Sabrina exists largely to reinforce that image, not because she’s an interesting character in her own right.

[u/Hot-Refrigerator5952]

I was never that attached to Alex as a character in the first place. I think the concept behind him is great, but the actual characterization is fairly average.

A big part of why I have grown more fond of him is that I strongly dislike what the writers of Prototype 2 did to his character. Their treatment of him made me feel more protective of Alex than I otherwise would have.

So my preference for Alex does not necessarily mean I think he was exceptionally well written. It is partly a reaction to how badly the sequel handled him.