You talk about what a character tells you when you see them but your examples clearly do not say that.
Nathan Drake for example, he looks like a pretty normal guy, it's what he does and how the story goes that make things interesting.
Cloud Strife, the best you can guess about him is he is a guy that fights with his big ass sword, but that's it.
I think that before judging a character, specially when we're talking about a game with a very detailed story,
we have to play in order to have a good judgement about that character.
For example I'm gonna talk about Cloud, most my friends just hate it, they say he's one of the worst main character of games, he is the hero of the story just by occasion because Zack died and is more of an emo than anything actually good, but before saying that's true or not I'm gonna play the game to say what I really think about him