Gamasutra - Losing For Good.
If we talk about the idea of losing "permanently" in video games, the typical response is that players would never accept that kind of treatment. Oh sure, some people play roguelikes, but that's just a niche within a niche. But what if we're thinking about "losing" in too narrow a sense? What if a player could fail at a game's objectives and still be allowed to continue without a game over screen? What if failing was built right into a game's design?

IGN - Out of Characters. Thanks Ant.
A good 90% of playable characters fall into the Heavily Armed Badass category. You can faction that down to four types: Space Marine, G.I. John Doe, Semi-God of Whoopass, and Foreigner with Overcompensation Sword. Kind of a small pool to draw from, isn't it? Hell, most JRPGs are still riffing off the character archetypes set down by Final Fantasy VII thirteen years ago. Tetsuya Nomura (who designed those archetypes) went on record calling Lightning, his lead character for Final Fantasy XIII, a female version of VII's Cloud Strife. In other words, an uber-morose and largely self-absorbed man-magnet with a hidden past. Been there.