The Witcher video game series is a trilogy of games based on a dark fantasy book series by Polish author Andrzeg Sapkowski. Having heard nothing but the highest praises for the third entry in the series, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, I decided to buy the Game of the Year Edition for a bargain deal nearly a year and a half after the game first released. Little did I know that I would more than get my money’s worth and that I would discover Geralt of Rivia, the White Wolf, a character that will live on in my mind as one of my favorite gaming protagonists. As I experienced the game from beginning to end, I was taken through an emotional roller coaster, both through the story and in regards to my thoughts and feelings about the game’s unique protagonist. These are the reasons why I believe that Geralt is one the most interesting characters in gaming today.
He Doesn’t Appear to Be a Hero
Geralt is a witcher, a human being mutated and trained in combat to hunt and kill the ravenous monsters that infest his world and terrorize its people. Living in a brutal world engulfed in war and tragedy, he operates as a travelling mercenary, taking jobs for anyone who would pay him to solve their monstrous and supernatural problems. This seems straight forward enough. You might consider him a hero for hire, but in order to become a witcher, he first underwent a painful mutation process that granted him superhuman abilities at the cost of suppressing his emotions.
Not only that, but it is witcher tradition to stay out of the affairs and troubles of the wider world and to only intervene on behalf of those who would ideally pay him coin to solve their problems. He is a stoic and gruff individual who often finds himself a hesitant and skeptical participant in many of his adventures. He’s emotionally distant from his work, yet he also suggests a bad habit of getting with every available woman who falls for him over his noble deeds. At times, you would be forgiven for not finding him all too appealing. This was my own first impression.
Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover
I should have known not to judge a book by its cover. Through the game’s many character interactions and branching dialog choices, I was not only able to make the character’s most profound choices, but I was able to see the full range of personality hidden beneath his gruff and grizzled exterior in his most mundane interactions.
In one moment, he can be sarcastically defiant before the will of kings. In others, he’s a kindhearted warrior willing to break with tradition to restore a ravaged village to its people with little thought of pay. Yet in others, he vacillates between staunchly autonomous loner and meek and submissive lover. What amazes me is how much could have been easily missed had I not actively diverged from the driving plot to discover the world and each of its diverging side stories that deepened the characters and enriched the lore.
It’s Always the Quiet Ones
For a monster hunter who claims to have supposedly suppressed his emotions into nonexistence through experimental mutation, he has a surprisingly deep well of underlying emotion. Throughout the game, he insists that he has no emotions, yet the driving motive that compels him from one adventure to the next is his increasingly desperate search to find his beloved adopted daughter, Cirilla. Beneath the stoic facade is the heart and soul of a man desperate to reconnect with his little girl whom he hadn’t seen since she was a child. He shows a surprising amount of rage when he threatens to butcher three witches who he learned once tried to eat her, and pleads for her to stay when Cirilla leaves him once again to save the world.
Scars of a Broken Yet Resilient Man
In some ways, I can’t help but feel that the many scars that coat his back and face represent more than his many years fighting and killing monsters. Both his scars and his suppressed emotions reveal a jaded and skeptical individual, afraid to care and afraid of losing the people he loves most. Throughout his quest to find his adopted daughter and to save her from the malevolent Wild Hunt who pursues her, Geralt interacts with a world ravaged by war, littered with acts of senseless tragedy and haunted by terrors that rest neither day or night.
Geralt puts on a hard shell to protect himself from the horrors and often uses the excuse of neutrality to avoid the inevitable pain of personal investment, yet in his relationships you see a man who, beneath the rugged surface, dwells a deeply complex and conflicted individual. In spite of his witchers’ insistence of amoral neutrality, Geralt of Rivia is a man of fierce principle, a broken idealist with a heart of gold whose love and loyalty knows little bounds for the ones he holds most dear.