Assemble! - Custom Shooter Squad - The Cowboy

Welcome to Assemble!

Here, we'll look at several different characters across multiple series to see who would form a perfect team for a certain genre. From fighting game rosters to RPG adventuring parties, different types of characters tend to show up frequently. What we'll do here is look at those archetypes to see what character is the best fit for that slot, and in the end, we’ll have the best team for the job. These articles will also be shorter entries, compared to some of the more long-form articles here, focusing on one or two characters at a time.

Despite a perception of a lot of these titles as generic war games, some shooters allow players to dive into an engaging story in a captivating world, taking the role of interesting characters with varied weapons, abilities, personalities, and motivations, especially with the popularity of hero shooters like Team Fortress 2, Overwatch, and Paladins. In this series of Assemble articles, we will be assembling a hero shooter roster using characters from several different shooters, based on different character archetypes.

The picks will be based on the different themes and tones of the characters and the worlds they inhabit as well as the roles they fill on a team or the kinds of weapons they use. Only characters that originated from video games, shooters particularly, will be observed here. Both first and third-person shooters will count and so will first and third-person action games if their main method of combating enemies is gunplay. Finally, I’ll only be discussing games and characters that I am at least somewhat familiar with. While this means I won’t discuss every shooter in existence, there should still be a good amount of variety with the series explored.

THE COWBOY

Along with military members fighting wars around the world, the gunslingers of the American Wild West are some of the most well-known archetypes of shooter protagonists. Commonly seen armed with one or two revolvers, a shotgun, or a rifle, the Cowboy is commonly either portrayed as a sheriff attempting to bring justice to the frontier or an outlaw seeking fortune at others’ expense. While they are seen more often in movies and television, especially in the 1950s and 60s when Western films and shows were at their most popular, some notable examples if the archetype have also shown up more modern works, including video games.

Our pick for the Cowboy is…

John Marston from Red Dead Redemption.

After a rough childhood, he joins up with Dutch van der Linde’s gang and becomes an outlaw, perpetrating several heists along the American West. After a few years though, in which time he meets his wife and has a child with her, he eventually leaves the gang and decides to settle down. This lasts until two government agents track him down and try to use him to hunt down his former gang members. His entire life plays out like a long Western movie or show. Practically every type of storyline that the Western covers is experienced through Marston. Marston himself is a strong protagonist for this kind of story, being someone who used to be an outlaw, but now wants to live an honest life with his family. But because his past can’t stay buried forever, he eventually pays the price for his misdeeds.

For portraying a life emblematic of a Wild West protagonist, we now add John Marston to our roster.

ADDED!

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What did you think about this article? Want to see what other characters get picked for our roster? Do you think someone would fit this role better besides whoever got picked? Make your voice heard in the comments below. 

Thanks for coming!