Bingo-worthy, shows how male and female characters are not treated equally. The contrast is very clear at this game cover art, and it summarizes bikiniarmorbattledamage in one picture.
Honestly, what is even the point? You might as well be naked, going into battle looking like that. She doesn’t even look like she belongs in the setting. Also for people not in the know, this is NOT a dating sim where you’re a stud (?) with long flowing hair who’s looking for a sexy girlfriend. This game is about fighting and conquering for your royal family. With troops that wear bikinis, apparently. Fantasy~
At least the dude (the player character) has some nipple accents on his breastplate to even it out?
Though personally, I would have just taken away 85% of his armor. When will game devs give the people what they want? ?
I’d say Hyrule Warriors developers should be ashamed of having this sort of artwork going public, with all the tackyness of “female Link” having boobplate, bared belly and panties on top of trousers, but judging by their Zelda costume concepts, “tacky” is their status quo and shame is alien to them.
~Ozzie
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Fixing Some Grim Designs ?, Part 2
Thanks to my forgetfulness, Throwback Thursday and Wednesday redesign switched places this week. Hope you don’t mind!
It wasn’t a very inspired stream for me, so I basically worked from a Zenescope artist’s default mindset. The difference is, my priority wasn’t “MOAR BEWB”.
Most major edit was sharperning her facial features, so that she looks like an old lady we expect Baba Yaga to be. She doesn’t need to be “sexy” to disguise her dangerous nature – looking like a grandma already did that! Also gave her greying eyebrows and got rid of those random golden rectangles (warpaint?) on her cheeks which, because of outlines, looked like adhesive bandages and added nothing to the design.
I’m not as happy with her new, older face as I am with Arhian, but anything’s preferable to Generic Hot Lady Face #9575.
Another obvious fix was turning this bodypaintboobplate into something resembling a breastplate. Not my best edit, and I left the center of the chest kinda barren, but I did extend her pseudo-gorget to somewhat normal size for this armor piece. Now she can’t die of stabbing in the cleavage!
The lesser edits, after those, were thickening of her noodly arms and putting a red dress under her plate armor pieces. Not exactly realistic or practical padding, but still preferable to gratuitous skin display.
Definitely among my worse redesigns, but I hope you like it in comparison to the original anyway!
~Ozzie
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Wrestling with TERA’s anti-fashion Part 2
Yikes.
So I decided to challenge myself yet again by picking this number. Back in an older post on TERA, I talked about how some of the armor designs are good designs for runway fashion, and I think the high elves, which is what this lady is, embody that most of all. I think each race has their, like… fashion niche? Like the demons are all Victoria’s Secret angels, ironically. And we don’t talk about the children with animal ears.
(And because I needed to fill in all those little details, I didn’t have time to do the back of her :(. )
I started with the face as usual, because I honestly hate the original in this regard… Like, what is with this Stock 3D Model face?? I tried to make it less human-looking since, you know… she’s not a human. (I kind of ripped off Dragon Age 2 in this regard, I guess.)
And then I changed…. everything else, as usual. Poofy pants, a whole 3 layers of shirts, and shoes you can actually walk in, we’ve got the whole package. I tried to make the shirt patterns work together, but I think I was a little overzealous… I also ran out of ideas. Oh well.
Hopefully my redesign still looks more like actual cloth armor than that big empty void of skin.
Her shoes looks stylish and comfy, I’ll give her that. Other parts not only serve zero protection against weather and battle damage, they also look like they’d slip off from her body within minutes of moving around.
This was our first attempt at fixing some of the most egregious excuses for costumes we could find in Soul Calibur games. Both those heroines would return to our streams on other occasions (including a special, already released post).
Ivy
My mortal enemy, Ivy Valentine’s declining standard in outfits. Ugh. I chose her because I love to play her when I do get to play SC (not often these days), and because she’s supposed to be a Machiavellian Immortal Super Villain (sort of), and boy, do none of the lingerie designs communicate any of this.
So anyway.
I picked this concept art from SC5 cause at least it’s redeemable. I always liked her more suit-like designs, because that shows off her personality better, I think. So I went with that and gave her a functional, high-class (cause her fam’s rich) kind of suit. Due to a personal preference for 3-piece suits, I gave her a vest to go with it. I mean, she’s still hot as hell.
I gave her pants, obviously, and of course, actual shoes with thick, sturdy riding heels. My last addition was this thigh sword sheath thing, because I didn’t want to break the lines on her waist and hips with a belt, but it might have been better to give her a belt sheath that hangs in the back. Like this:
It’s not as silly and I could hide the belts under her suit or something. I also wanted to incorporate the snake motif more, so I did a derpy sketchy one on her knee there.
Oh, and the face!
I hope Cassandra is proud.
-Icy
Tira
Tira’s aesthetic not only is “poor man’s Harley Quinn”, it’s also clothes so incredibly tattered, there’s no way they’d stay up under any circumstances.
I wasn’t particularly inspired during that streaming session, so I concluded that as long as her clothes look wearable, it counts as improvement.
Can’t say I’m all that proud of overall design, especially the cut of her blouse and pants, but they came out of desperation to save her from chilly winds and to layer the tights and undershirt I gave her. I guess it’s supposed to be a vaguely clown-like outfit without resembling Harley’s. Got the pink for the tights from her eye color and super faded pink-ish highlights in her hair…
…speaking of which, since her weird pigtails looked detached from the rest of the hairstyle, I got rid of them altogether and left her with a bob. Then recolored (and added some more) highlights matching her overall color scheme.
While the clothes I gave her are a big meh, I’m quite proud of the changes to her face, expression and makeup. Tira is supposed to be super unstable, so a runny mascara matches her personality much better and gives her more intense gaze. Also two-colored lipstick, to compliment the highlights. And I gave her much bigger mouth with more wicked smile, a bulbous nose and a unique jawline – now you can recognize this lady by her facial features, not just color scheme. You’re welcome.
~Ozzie
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What do you mean this character is NOT a result of semi-incestious relationship between Angela and female Thor? Wait, this is supposed to be… Baba Yaga?
Zenoscope’s Grimm Fairy Tales never disappoints in being disappointing.
~Ozzie
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Uprooting the Sexy Flower Warriors
[We’re not sure how a draft gets posted without our permission, but Tumblr might as well start collapsing from all sides at this point. Here’s the actual full post!]
This dominatrix-looking lady apparently “evolved” by exchanging a short dress and no pants for short pants and two ribbons. Her previous form, for comparison:
Looking for inspiration, I just googled “fritillaria” and I learned that in Polish we call this kind of lily a “chessboard flower”, for pretty obvious reasons, once you look at its petals:
I decided that though this character seems based different species, fritillaria camschatcensis (there was no info on her being “chocolate lily” back then), fritillaria meleagris is much more striking visually, so I included its colors and chessboard pattern in my redesign. She doesn’t resemble her actual flower in the first place anyway.
While the costume is amazingly skimpy and objectifying (especially that excuse for a “bra”), it’s not without a potential. There’s promising metal cincher, which I decided to enlarge and turn into full breastplate, and she comes with POOFY PANTS, a staple of BABD redesign streams, which I adorned with tassets that compliment their shape and match the breastplate.
I got rid
of her long-ass pigtails and of all the action lines, which collectively made the composition more chaotic than dynamic. Minor thing that bothered me was her sword being stuck in the ground for some reason instead of fastened to her belt, so I quickly fixed that too. The final touch were, of course, sleeves and tights with purple chessboard pattern, which tie the whole thing together.
I found the abundance of fleur-de-lis symbols on her to be hilariously excessive, to the point I erased all of them during the stream. After some deliberation I figured that maybe the one on her hat fits, so I just muted its color, because magenta doesn’t fit the new scheme I gave her.
All in all, I find Fritillaria to be one of my most inspired redesigns, which makes me doubly disappointed in her creators, considering they could have just googled a flower photo to get some non-boring ideas.
Love how she’s apparently Maple by the fact that she has some maple leaf hair clips and a bit of a maple leaf pattern on one small part of her mini skirt. So for this one, I channeled my inner Blizzard character artist, in that I wanted to way overdo the whole maple leaf theme. (I used samurai armor as reference.)
I ended up redoing almost her entire torso, since I needed to give her an actual breastplate, instead of… I guess it’s a crop top camisole? (Do those exist?) Then I gave her actual kusazuri (the plates hanging down her legs), and made them maple leaf shaped!
I did give her a less traditional chest piece, but there are so many small shapes in the design that we needed the main armor pieces to be bigger, I think. I did break it up with a huge maple leaf on it though.
I also hated everything about her face and hair, so I gave her a more traditional hairstyle to match her more determined expression. There were also a lot of smaller edits, like flipping her foot around so she’s not standing as awkwardly, and adding some volume and muscle to her sword arm.
And finally, I added a few more small maple leafs to her “skirt,” to really reinforce that maple leaf theme. I’d hate for people to miss it. Though, honestly, after finishing this redesign, I think she should just wear a maple leaf costume.
-Icy
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If You Hate It, Then You Should Have Put a Sweater on It (and we did)
We wanted to do a silly stream where we put sweaters on a few poor ladies drawn for Applibot’s ridiculous requests. We apologize in advance for any discomfort caused by looking at the originals.
Hoo boy. The Rain Goddess, as she is called, from the Totally-Not-Collectible-Cheesecake-Game Legend of the Cryptids. (Although I couldn’t find her page on their wiki, maybe she was removed.) I have mixed feelings about this one, because on the one hand, I’m glad I could give her a sweater, but on the other, I end up scrolling past her original picture every time I look through my BABD image folder. It’s like looking into the Void. Or as the young’ins are calling it, a Cursed Image.
Since she’s a rain goddess (I guess? that’s what the artist called her), I googled “rain sweater” for inspiration, and found this lovely children’s sweater design.
It was perfect, really. Most of the stream time was spent rendering this out so that it would somewhat match the original style. If nothing else, the artist had a great technique. It’s a shame about the subject matter, is all.
The final touches were on her face, where I gave her more of a smirk instead of a pout, and made her mascara/eyeliner run a little.
May the Rain Goddess be comfy and warm in her bright rain sweater. While kneeling in the ocean. I couldn’t fix that part. Or her evolved form.
-Icy
There’s no-one who needs a cozy sweater more than Arctic Permafrost Empress (also from Legend of the Cryptids), both due to her icy domain and one of the most eyes-melting (:P) costumes.
I referenced some batwing sweaters for this, and since one-color garment looked a tiny bit bare, I decided to paint great tits similar to the ones from the Sadira redo post and made them into a fun puntastic print on the sweater. (Edit on the left)
I also changed her facial features to be more distinct and replaced her boring makeup with some blue face paint (which I only hope doesn’t appropriate any culture), just to make her tad more interesting than Random Supermodel #05867
Here’s the original artist’s blog post, with some references he used for the Empress’ design. Amazingly, seems like he came up with the weird lingerie shapes almost entirely on his own (or at Applibot’s request?).
