November 12, 2012 – One of the most often asked questions following our 2011 feature about The Best (and Worst) Female RPG Characters has been, "So when will you do a feature about the guys?" This actually proved to be a more daunting challenge than anticipated. Not only has the sheer number of characters required months of deliberation, but the diversity of casts required a keener eye. We had to ask ourselves the philosophical question of, "What is 'manliness' and what makes a man manly?" We discovered that manliness is itself a complicated construct and that there are myriad valid measures of being a man. Not only does the firefighter who rushes into a burning building to save a child exemplify masculinity, but so does the single father rearing his children the best that he can in a time of uncertainty. So, for this feature, we created 10 distinct categories and selected the two most compelling male characters to represent those categories.

So let us celebrate the myriad types of men out there in the RPG and graphic adventure world and see what makes each one "manly" in his own special way. Be warned, though, that many of these writeups contain spoilers from the various games they represent.