User blog comment:TheUnknown285/My Mass Effect 2 Review/@comment-5274392-20120726041053/@comment-4950455-20120728090307

While I find your argument that ME2 should be judged harshly for not following a theme that didn't yet exist bizarre at best, I'm far more concerned by this statement:

When you create a character, you need to have the audience feel not just sympathy in the case of all of the ME2 squadmates, but also empathy, because that's were the true understanding of the character comes into play.

I strongly disagree with this on multiple levels. Firstly, you seem to have trouble with the concept of analogy - taking one example, while no one today has been literally designed from the ground up by their father, plenty of people have struggled with a more normally domineering parent. We don't (or shouldn't - see below) have to be familiar with precisely the details of a character's problems to empathize with them. After all, no one today has giant techno-organic cuttlefish coming to kill them, do they?

Secondly, and more importantly - I'd say that this matters for much more then ME2 - I'm not sure I agree with your emphasis on empathy at all, at least in the way you seem to mean it. The primary thing a character needs is to be interesting, nothing more and nothing less. Trying too hard to create characters that the modern reader will empathize with, in any sense more general then a basic emotional level (what you seem to mean by "sympathy"), has often been the bane of both historical fiction and science fiction. It leads to the creation of characters and entire settings that are thinly-veiled representatives of modern sensibilities, rather then exploring any of the possibilities created by that time period. The best fiction teaches us something about ourselves, but I honestly think some degree of difference is needed for that to work; you don't learn that much staring in a mirror.