Destroyable Armor – Why we should destroy it

bikiniarmorbattledamage:

I was quite surprised to find people rushing to comment that a certain terrible screenshot was actually demonstrating destroyable armor (I guess if you already knew about it, and hence knew that her armor had been destroyed… so it doesn’t really help with marketing).

Now we have mentioned destroyable armor before… but maybe it’s best we do a little more talking on it since apparently it’s a thing that’s been sold as making sense.  Surprisingly, the first appearance of this trope in video games (that I’m aware of) was inflicted up a male character.

A manly man named Arthur who was on a quest to save his love, Prince Prin Prin (actual name!), from a foe no less than Satan himself (who lives in Hades… just go with it! I promise nothing in the game will make any more sense than this summary. Nothing at all.)

It was released in 1985 and is probably one of the most frustrating video games ever to grace an arcade (you can play it here if you don’t believe me, and imagine putting money in every time you run out of lives)

Arthur had a full suit of plate male armor that would, upon the impact of any attack or even light touch of an enemy, fly off and leave him running around in his whitey tighties (later re-inventions would give him boxer shorts).  Destroyable armor didn’t make sense in Ghosts ‘N Goblins and it’s not going to make sense anywhere else.

While “soft” armors like kevlar weave and leather will become less protective over time they don’t fly apart for a very simple reason.  Anything that hits your hard enough to dislodge armor from your person has hit you hard enough to kill you.  Even the force to dislodge regular clothes by impact (rather than deliberate tearing off) will easily kill you in a most spectacular fashion!

Armor isn’t a car, it doesn’t have crumple zones. Your armor being blasted off you and you coming out relatively unscathed means that you are literally tougher and more resistant to damage of all sorts than your armor is.  

That’s the story you tell when you show a character get hit and their armor falls off.  It doesn’t matter if it applies to all genders (though it always seems to be women chosen for the “demo”), it just doesn’t make sense and is more distracting than simply going without armor.  There are so many better ways to convey damaged armor:

Missing enamel/coloring, destroyed ornamentation, blood marks, changes in the silhouette on parts etc all convey that the armor is damaged and becoming less and less useful without also conveying that the actual point of the game is to try to see your character naked without them dying.

– wincenworks

A thing we didn’t reference in yesterday’s redesign post is that Kanpani Girls indulges in a very particular version of destroyable armor trope – creepy “defeated” sprites of humiliated waifus with their clothes and “armor” shred to pieces. I’ll put Flavie and Marica’s “defeated” looks under the cut for comparison with the previous post, because it’s genuinely disturbing. 

So this week’s throwback is a reminder that there’s no reason to incorporate armor which suspiciously falls apart during (or after) a fight in fiction, especially on female characters. And people who do it have an obvious agenda to show off flesh, not battle damage, which could be easily conveyed in non-pervy ways. 

~Ozzie