I figure everyone hits that saturation point sooner or later. There's very little in fiction that hasn't already been done in one form or other, and sooner or later you start to see stuff you recognize from somewhere else in pretty much everything. But if you spend a long enough time reading, watching movies, etc., everything starts to seem cliched after awhile. From my perspective, I'll be the first to admit that Haken's a cliched character.
It sounds like this kind of character is still pretty fresh for them. I guess I'm coming at it from a different angle than these guys are, though.
I keep seeing people post, 'Such-and-such is cliche!', meaning I've seen this before in other places!, like every game is supposed to serve up a new type of story that no one's ever seen before.) I don't know why people here get so hung up over this.
