Cunning and ruthless are just a few adjectives, and completely over-used in cheap literature.
Well, In English literature, you have:
1. Person against person (Typical good guy against bad guy)
2. Person against group or community (Good guy kills enemies to save village)
3. Person against Nature (living in the forest)
4. Person against Creature/thing (like the wolf in little red riding hood)
and..
5. Person against himself (Final Link's Adventure boss, Shadow Link)
Those would all be heros in literature, because they always save something, whether it be themselves, or their race, or whatever.
A hero is a strong word in any case, though. In today's society, a hero is someone who rescues, saves people from dying, or saves a large group of people from dying. The men on the White House-bound 911 airplane were heroes for crashing it down, saving all those people. That was heroic. None of those men prepared to do that. None of them had the same attitude.
So, in essence, do all heros have to be the typical "heroic"? No, that's what we see in cheap films, books from the pharmacy, and children's literature. Do villians have to be completely vile? Once again, no... you just have to have one of the protagonist's formulas and it will work. If it doesn't work, it's going to have a horrible story. And what's the point of a video game if there's no story to tell, anyways? Modernism! Where the story is mangled up, nothing makes sense, and it flops! Example? MGS2.
The key is diversity, not set rules or trends like being "edgy", "heroic", or in the other cases "vile" or evil".
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