I'm finally ready to vote for this! For the longest time I couldn't decide. And I'm still not sure that I would decide between just one character, but for this poll I voted for Ayla. It's between her and Lucca, who ironically are both characters I did not think terribly highly of when I first played the game. I couldn't stand Ayla's dialect, and Lucca fell flat.
But looking back into the heart of the story, and at the characters just itching to be seized upon by your imagination, I think Lucca and Ayla have the best stories to tell. In terms of personality I'm more like Lucca than the other six, but I chose Ayla because I think she is the single most underrated character in the game, and the single most elegant. Goodness knows I underrated her too...and for a long time. But I see now, in my wiser years, that her backstory is at least as compelling as anyone else's, although it's a bit more subtle to grasp. She is pivotal in the moment of human ascension to speciary supremacy in the world, and her vivacity saved the human species not only from a war of evolution, but from the catastrophe of Lavos.
She is a stronger person, from a simpler time, and to me she represents a world not in human prehistory but in the human future, a world of elegant logic, free from the corruption and deception of our own human weakness. Ayla's endearing virtue is that she understood that you do what you can, and you do what's best...and nothing less. If you succeed in that, you live. If not, you die. It is one of the only inviolable rules in the heavens above or on the Earth below...and one that her era recognized more clearly than we do, as though common sense were some lost, vestigial ability in our era. Now, of course, the definition of "best" is of course grounds for generations of debate yet to come, but the point is that I admire the fact that it never even occurs to Ayla to linger on emotional drama, or to try to manipulate or deceive people, or to do what's not best. She is incredibly disciplined in that regard.
But she also enjoys the sensual pleasures of life, which monotheistic religion has spent thousands of years trying to wipe from of the human condition. She seems to revel in every type of pleasure there is, and in that basic wisdom she both precedes our religious backwardness and represents its ultimate, inevitable defeat.
Ayla is a corporeal lick of fire who knows what she is about. That is more than most of us can say, for all our 65 million years of evolution.
And of course, I very much appreciate that Ayla is the strongest physical character in the game, and a woman. This was groundbreaking for RPGs of the day, and you still won't find it to be a terribly common theme even today. To some people who are driven by sexual desire or sexist derision, or both, Ayla is easy to objectify, but from her own behavior in the game it seems pretty obvious that Ayla just doesn't care about gender roles and the battle of the sexes. In fact, there's only one line in the whole game--the one about Kino being a man--that throws any sort of shadow over her magnificent ability to combine the modernly incompatible traits of being a woman and being, if you will humor the idiot, "on top." Truly, given the context of the player of the game, who lives in a sexist world in which Ayla would be utterly foreign, this club-wielding berserker is a symbol for all human beings, that, with passion and intelligence, and so much ambition varnished over in zeal, we can be who we are, and damn anyone who tells us No.
Definitely, the best character in the game.
Poll