whereismywizardhat submitted:

From upcoming JRPG Tears of Avia, an upcoming kickstarter.

What… the… hell?!?

(We waited until after the Kickstarter had finished before publishing this, just to avoid any chance we may inadvertently help them gain funding.)

Looking into this, it appears they have variant so the boob window isn’t showing bare skin.  However it’s unclear which is the “true” version.

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It also appears that the Ranger character is at least as bad:

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During the course of the Kickstarter they started introducing “exclusive armor” designs as rewards for support – the first one was introduced without comment regarding the character.  The second with the summary of “Iris is a bit of a self-assured overconfident character, she’s a know-it-all but is somewhat clumsy from time to time. Despite her brash personality she does get along with people fairly well, even if some of the others simply tolerate her behaviour.

Glossing over that the summary is basically a list of flaws, the design priority seems to be to assure you that she’ll probably fall and give you a panty flash at some stage if you fund this game.  Because that isn’t creepy at all.

Interestingly they don’t call it a JRPG but “Tactical RPG”, probably because it doesn’t appear to follow the usual conventions of a JPRG. However, they’ve certainly tried to jump on board and make it look like a JRPG in terms of imagery. They’re even trying to mimic Final Fantasy right down to having “totally not Buster Sword”.

This strikes me as heavily problematic since the “head office” for the company is in the UK and, while some are Asian, not one staff member actually comes from Japan. (Though interestingly the manga adaptation of an anime the lead artist is “known for” is not yet available in English) 

The whole production though still looks disturbingly white centric:

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I don’t mean that in the sense of just assuming due to the skin tone they’re white, I mean in things like the heroes have European inspired clothes and armor and the enemies Japanese inspired:

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The overwhelming dominance of blond hair and blue eyes among the characters shown on the site (though in the demo and the poster they seem to have added variation but still look pretty damn white).

None of this is really surprisingly since random bikini armor invariable signals lazy design and that leads to a cascade of problems in mechanics and content.  Extra Credits did a whole episode on this happening with Call of Juarez: The Cartel, and we still (unfortunately) remember the Axe Princess kickstarter.

– wincenworks