The NPCs Are Running This Show

Ask any gaming community which character they would follow into a spinoff and the answer almost never lands on the protagonist.

It lands on the fan favorite. The one who showed up in the margins and became the reason people finished the game. The one whose lore threads run longer than any official wiki entry. The one whose story the games only partially told, and whose fans have spent years filling in the rest themselves.

That character already has an audience. That audience already knows exactly what story they want. In almost every case, that character has never had an animated series.

The community already voted

Sephiroth ranked as the most requested DLC fighter in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate history. Square Enix built an extended Final Fantasy VII universe around him specifically because the community made the demand impossible to ignore. Cloud holds the protagonist role. Sephiroth runs the cultural conversation.

Majima started as an antagonist in Yakuza while Kiryu held the protagonist role. SEGA gave him a full playable arc in Yakuza 0 and a starring role in Yakuza: Dead Souls because the fan response left no other rational choice. He now has a dedicated game of his own.

Vaas in Far Cry 3 gets less screen time than the game's actual final boss, and yet fan investment in that character drove Ubisoft to build a full standalone DLC expansion around him years after the original release. A supporting antagonist with a few hours of gameplay generated enough sustained audience energy to justify an entire production.

This is a pattern the industry keeps rediscovering and has not yet fully acted on.

Why fan favorite side characters hit differently

The protagonist role carries a structural constraint. Every player projects themselves into that character, which means the protagonist ends up belonging to everyone and no single creative vision at the same time. The writers leave room for the player. The character stays open enough to receive whatever the audience brings.

Supporting characters carry none of that. They get to be fully themselves, with opinions, limits, contradictions, and a sense of humor that belongs entirely to them. Garrus Vakarian in Mass Effect held more documented player investment than any other crew member in the franchise without ever carrying the main story. Mordin Solus generated some of the most emotionally resonant moments in trilogy history from a supporting scientist role. Kim Kitsuragi in Disco Elysium became the primary reason players recommend that game to others, despite Harrier du Bois technically carrying the story.

What players attach to is specificity. A character with a real point of view, clear allegiances, and something at stake entirely their own.

That specificity is exactly what animation is built to carry.

Side character series solve the canon problem

Adapting a protagonist's story for a game to animation project means committing to one canonical version of events in a world where players made different choices. Shepard's decisions varied by playthrough. Geralt's path through Witcher 3 varied by playthrough. Every canonical version of the main story argues with someone's memory of it.

A side character animated series opens up something more creatively interesting: the full story of someone whose arc the game could only gesture at, told on its own terms. Garrus existed before and after every version of Shepard's story. His arc on Omega, his relationship with justice, his history inside the IP, all of it belongs to the franchise without touching the main story's contested ground.

The series adds to the world rather than negotiating with player memory. It gives fans exactly what they have been waiting for while opening the IP to audiences who may never have played the game.

The fan community already built the demand

Game fan communities do not wait for studios to greenlight the stories they want. Archive of Our Own, the largest fan fiction platform in the world, holds more game-based entries than any other medium category. The characters dominating those archives come overwhelmingly from supporting cast. Search any major RPG and the most beloved characters in fan creative work rarely carry the named protagonist role.

Fan communities commission art, fund voice actor appearances at conventions, run campaigns for side character DLC, and maintain lore wikis more detailed than any official documentation. That represents years of active creative investment in characters whose full stories have never been told.

A side character animated series meets that investment directly. The audience already knows the character's backstory, already cares about their relationships, and has already spent years wanting exactly the expanded story a series would give them.

What the IP library actually contains

Every major RPG, every game franchise with multiple entries, every open-world game with a significant supporting cast contains beloved side characters with documented fan devotion, years of community investment, and story arcs the games only partially explored.

The animated series with the most built-in momentum usually centers on that fan favorite who kept appearing in the margins, accumulating more audience loyalty than the hero whose name sits on the box. Those characters already have communities. Those communities already know the story they want to see.

Animated vertical series are the format built to give it to them.

StoryCo is the largest producer of vertical animated content in the world. We develop animated vertical series from game IP, with full human voice casts, sound design, and music, at a fraction of traditional animation cost and time. We have delivered 400+ titles and 2,500+ videos across platforms, with a roster of 800+ voice actors worldwide.