Because relationship issues is what the first thing you think of on a battlefield.

I honestly get tired of the "ooooooh yuna your hurting me or cloud why?" those scenes piss me off after awhile. To be truly honest I pay no attention to the dialogs during gameplay. I focus on the gameplay only and if its a part where I have to sit through and walk around and can't shoot like when Marcus Fenix in Gears of War is talking to his other teammates (Delta or Cole for that matter). I completely like the "bad butt" design it sells so why complain.

Do you have an accurate idea of what a warzone actually looks like? Soldiers are cutting their wrists and hanging themselves every day in deployment, they suffer mental trauma's -and have psychiatric meetings every week, sometimes even day, they suffer from nightmares often for years, they cannot sleep, they go home and suffer from severe paranoia and have a difficultly adjusting back and maintaining their prior social relationships. Some go crazy and take out their entire squad before finishing themselves off.

Most soldiers go through a lot of emotional turmoil and truama if they have been on the frontlines and certainly very few of them talk and act like the ones in every modern "war game".

The inability for a game to sell (or even be made for that matter) that accurately reflects a real warzone setting, not only the guts n gore but also the inner emotional wars that soldiers must battle every single day is a testament to the immaturity of this industry.

 Agreed. Another badass I like is Kratos. But his personality and anger are tied in directly with the story. His VO isn't atrocious and he doesn't cuss every five seconds in an attempt to come off as badass. But he doesn't have to, he's kratos. Bender in Gears of war has to struggle to come off as badass by screaming awful dialouge. Kratos doesn't have to try so hard. Snake from MGS is another character that could be considered "badass" but he's also given human feelings and doesn't try too hard to be macho like the characters I can't stand. That being said, I LOVE Gears of War. It's a favorite of mine. I just can't stand the characters, Dialouge, or anything of the sort, the gameplay is just too damn fun!

If there is no fictionally supported context for it (that is actually well developed) then yes, people will construe it as being more bad ass. Have you not seen dozens of posts talking about how bad ass the Helghast looks?

interestingly enough...i think this can be answered by my first post...

 Well, if your going to nitpick then okay. The same goes for villians in almost every game and it's not just the west like you suggest. Villians are suposed to have a menacing feature. Final Fantasy for example is well known for the villian Sephiroth, because of his menacing look and long sword. Same can be said for Cloud and his huge buster blade. Hell, Darth Vader and Darth Maul in Star Wars are made to look menacing are you going to say those films suffer because of it? If your going to suggest that the game suffers because of the look of the enemies then you just opened the flood gates because you will be hard pressed to find any kind of media of the action variety that wouldn't fall to your expectations. The dialouge in K2 and I'm sure the story is enough to both make your point and for you personally to dislike the game. The character design just shows a weak argument unless your going to claim almost every other action based game and movie also fail in comparison.

You mean this?

"Who wants to play as a bitch?"

Ironically that is the mindset that I am speaking of and that is holding the industry back from exploring greather depth of character and story. The industry will never be accepted as a legitimate artform as film, literature and music have. Heck, even comics books contain more depth than what you are proposing, essentially a bar on all "human elements" appearing in our games.

Matt Hazard eats people like you for breakfast.

duke nukem owns this thread, even though it's posible you weren't complaining about him :)