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Random freezes, missing sound and display glitches usually trace back to one bad driver. Find and replace yours safely.Free scan · under a minuteJoel Miller’s journey in The Last of Us takes the top spot—not because it offers a simple redemption story, but because its changing bond with Ellie makes the game’s final choice so difficult to judge. This is an argued ranking, not an objective canon: it weighs visible personal change, psychological complexity, how convincingly the story earns that change, the player’s involvement, and the thematic force of the ending.
How this ranking weighs a character arc
A character arc is more than a protagonist becoming kinder, stronger, or more capable. The strongest arcs connect a person’s choices to the relationships and pressures around them, make change feel earned, and give the ending consequences that illuminate what changed—or what did not.
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These games use different forms. In authored stories, writers control the decisive choices and can shape a tightly composed transformation. Role-playing games may let players influence relationships or outcomes, but agency by itself does not make an arc better written. The ranking considers both approaches by asking whether the game’s structure makes the character’s development meaningful.
There is no industry-standard ranking or independently measured consensus on the best game character arcs. The order below is editorial judgment. Several entries span multiple games, so the relevant series entry points are identified.
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The 10 best video game character arcs
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Joel Miller — The Last of Us
Joel begins the game shaped by grief and survival. The job of smuggling 14-year-old Ellie out of a quarantine zone becomes a cross-country journey, and the emotional center of the story is the gradual change in their relationship. That shift matters because it does not erase Joel’s past or turn him into an uncomplicated hero; it gives him something to risk losing again.
The ending tests the values the relationship has led him to adopt. Whether a player sees his choice as love, selfishness, or both, it is difficult to separate it from the bond built along the way. That tension makes the arc more compelling than a straightforward story of a hardened man learning to care.
Writer and director Neil Druckmann described the game as a story about meeting a character early and watching a bond evolve. In a 2013 interview, he said: “If we never do a sequel we’re ok with it, because we told the story we needed to tell.” PlayStation.Blog interview, June 7, 2013. That sense of a complete, consequential relationship is why Joel’s arc ranks first.
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Arthur Morgan — Red Dead Redemption 2
Arthur’s story is built around a man confronting the cost of the life he has lived and the future he has helped create. Its strength is the pressure between loyalty to his gang and his growing awareness of what that loyalty demands. Rather than treating change as a clean break from the past, the arc makes the past part of the reckoning.
Its placement here reflects the force of that late-life reassessment and the way it gives the game’s ending its emotional weight. Red Dead Redemption 2 is regularly included in broader discussions of narrative-focused games, but those roundups are not proof of a definitive character-arc ranking.
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Ellie Williams — The Last of Us Part II
Ellie’s arc in Part II is a study of how violence and vengeance can shape the person pursuing them. The sequel’s divided perspective complicates the player’s alignment rather than simply inviting celebration of revenge. NPR’s 2021 discussion interprets this structure as a way to confront the consequences of violence and vengeance; that is one critical reading, not a universal account of how players respond.
Rank #2
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Ellie’s story gains force from the gap between what she wants revenge to accomplish and what pursuing it costs. The game asks players to sit with that cost, even when they remain attached to her. NPR’s discussion of The Last of Us Part II explores that divided perspective.
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Commander Shepard — Mass Effect trilogy
Shepard’s arc is unusual because the player helps shape it across a trilogy. Choices and relationships contribute to a sense of continuity, while Shepard’s role as a leader places personal decisions inside a much larger conflict. That combination gives the player meaningful involvement without making agency alone the measure of the writing.
The trade-off is that Shepard’s personality can vary with the player’s choices, so the arc is less singularly authored than Joel’s or Arthur’s. Its achievement is the long view: decisions accumulate across games, making the character’s development feel connected to the player’s own path through the series.
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Cloud Strife — Final Fantasy VII
Cloud’s arc turns on the difference between the identity he presents and the more complicated person beneath it. The story’s payoff depends on that distinction: what initially looks like confidence and control becomes part of a larger question about memory, self-understanding, and vulnerability.
Cloud earns this place because the character’s development is bound to how the story reveals him, not just to a change in attitude. The arc is best understood through the original Final Fantasy VII story; later adaptations and retellings should not be treated as one identical version of his journey.
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Kratos — God of War (2018) and God of War Ragnarök
Kratos’s later arc is about living with a violent past while trying to become a different kind of father. The story does not ask the player to forget who he has been; it makes restraint and care difficult precisely because old habits remain close at hand.
Rank #3
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Atreus’s presence gives that change a practical test. Kratos has to decide not only what he believes but what he models for his son. The arc spans God of War (2018) and God of War Ragnarök, with the first game establishing the relationship that the sequel continues.
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Lee Everett — The Walking Dead
Lee’s arc is shaped by his responsibility for Clementine in a world where safety is scarce and moral choices rarely feel clean. His development is inseparable from what he teaches her—not only through advice, but through the decisions she witnesses him make.
That close link between character change and another person’s future gives Lee’s story its distinctive emotional payoff. The player’s choices can affect how he responds, though the relationship at its center remains the story’s defining thread.
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Clementine — The Walking Dead series
Clementine’s arc stretches across multiple games, giving the series room to show how a child shaped by danger becomes someone responsible for others. Her development is not a single reversal or revelation; it is a long accumulation of lessons about trust, protection, and survival.
The series format is the point: players see the effects of earlier experiences carried into later stages of her life. Clementine’s story works best when considered across the games rather than judged by one installment alone.
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Tidus and Yuna — Final Fantasy X
Final Fantasy X places Tidus and Yuna in a shared journey, but their arcs are not interchangeable. Tidus has to understand a world and a mission he initially sees from the outside; Yuna carries expectations that shape what she believes she must do. Their growing relationship makes those different perspectives matter to each other.
Rank #4
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The pairing earns its place through contrast and mutual influence: the characters’ emotional development is strengthened by what each comes to understand about the other. The arc is contained in the original game rather than spread across a long series.
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Kim Kitsuragi and Harrier “Harry” Du Bois — Disco Elysium
Disco Elysium treats character development as something the player helps navigate rather than a fixed transformation. Harry begins in personal disarray, and the role-playing structure lets players shape how he approaches the case and the people around him. Kim provides a sharply contrasting presence: a professional partner whose patience, judgment, and trust become part of the story’s human stakes.
Harry’s arc is deliberately variable, so different players may experience different versions of his recovery or continued failure. Kim’s steadier characterization offers a useful counterpoint. Together, they represent a form of character writing in which agency and relationship shape the experience without guaranteeing one prescribed outcome.
Where to start with Joel and Ellie
For readers who want to play the stories behind the first and third entries, PlayStation’s US storefront lists The Last of Us Part I Standard Edition as a PS5 disc game. PlayStation describes the edition as including the complete single-player story and Left Behind, which explores events in Ellie’s life with her friend Riley. Its guidance recommends playing the main single-player story first. Check the PS5 disc edition on PlayStation Direct; availability and price can vary by region.
PlayStation attributes more than 200 Game of the Year awards to The Last of Us on its product pages. That is the publisher’s stated figure, not an independently audited count, and awards do not establish the quality of a character arc. PlayStation’s The Last of Us Part I page also describes Joel’s assignment to smuggle Ellie from a quarantine zone and the journey that follows.
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Why these arcs rank differently
The ranking favors arcs whose change is closely connected to relationships and whose endings make that change matter. Joel’s story leads because the bond at its center reshapes how the player understands his final choice without resolving its moral difficulty. Arthur’s reckoning and Ellie’s pursuit of revenge make change costly in different ways; Shepard and Harry show how player-shaped development can work when choice is part of the design.
That is not a claim that one kind of arc is always better. A tightly authored story can deliver a concentrated transformation, while a role-playing game can make development feel personal by letting players participate in it. The deciding question is whether character, choice, and consequence fit together—not how many decisions the game offers.
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