All these indies claim to be a throwback to a golden era, with their "spiritual successors", and then the protagonists look like crap. We don't even get cool looking mascots anymore, the devs just straight up put themselves in the game, cartoony hipster devs with memes.

when was the last time you played as a yuman mascot in a 3D platformer not named Mario?

and when they do animal mascots, it looks terribad with no charm, like a cheap mobile game

Even B tier platformers of the past had mascots looking 10x better than this. Good indie character models? I can think of Yooka Laylee (former AAA devs duh).

I rather have no game, than a poor looking throwback. I really hate how 95% of indies look: terrible animations, terrible environments, terrible characters. I just wish they made games appropriate to their budgets instead of half assing and trying to make an ambitious 3D platformer/3D RPG on a tiny budget. I dont think its a coincidence the best looking indie games, and with good character designs, are 2D.

Kind of reminds me of the late 4th gen, when stuff like Aero the Acrobat, Gex, and Awesome Possum were coming out. Good mascots are hard to make.

You're generalizing and only chose a few samples out of the tens of thousands of indie games. As for memorable mascots. Shovel Knight & Cave Story as a couple examples of very well known ones and there is plenty more. You can just as easily generalize and ask why do AAA game suck at making memorable mascots and post that pic of 100 white generic male dudes.

This. For every dozen of generic character designs we get another dozen well done. Uniqueness and simplicity are the key for memorable designs. Meatboy is a red square with face and a bandage on his forehead, Shovel Knight is a cartoony knight with a shovel, Octodad is an octopus inside of a suit, Frisk is just a kid done in pixel art with a purple and blue shirt, Isaac is just a naked baby with a traumatized expression on his face... They are simple, you get the concept of the game by just looking at them, they are unique...

judging by the indies I played I can only conclude that the above is the opinion of a gaming hater

This has to be a joke post otherwise...

Most always that is true.

There exist exceptions... very very few exceptions.

What's up with you, indie haters.

Quote stares at you both with disappointment!

This thing, whatever it is, is not helping to change my opinion