Let's see... this one's pretty difficult. Well, I can get rid of a lot of potential answers by eliminating silent protagonists from the race. I like Gordon Freeman, Chell, Chrono, and Mystery Guy from Bioshock enough, but you can't really connect to them without any kind of dialogue. People who just yell and don't really give a lot in the way of plot or thoughts also don't count , so Link, Mario, and others along that line also get eliminated.
Phoenix Wright makes the nomination list for actually having a personality and for being relatable. Edgeworth also too as well. Duke Nukem is also note-worthy, but I'm not sure I can justify him as my favorite protagonist. Same goes for Raz from Psychonauts.
Note: Here, I had to take a break from writing. I couldn't decide on anyone being a particularly stand-out protagonist. So I changed my line of thinking.
I'm going to change my line of thinking to a great creation by a game developer. And I'm going with the protagonist of Amnesia: The Dark Descent. He doesn't throw out awesome one-liners, but Amnesia isn't the type of game that would need that. Instead, we're set up with a protagonist who intentionally loses his memory, and who has a completely unidentifiable enemy force hunting him. He's the perfect protagonist for what Amnesia sets up.
In regaining some sense of his past (since that seems to be the goal of every amnesiac in video games), we get a first-person view of Daniel's experiences beyond what happens in the goddamn creepy castle. Instead of letting us watch what happens, we maintain complete control. That keeps everything about as terrifying as Frictional Games could possibly want it. Plus, I actually care about this protagonist's back-story, something I can't say for many of them, apparently.
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