Started playing Gems of War, and its female outfit situation is pretty dreary.
My “favourites” are the Ice Witch’s floating boob cups and the armour-clad green hippo (Sunweaver) with the random boob window. Though the balloon-boobed snow leopard (Shadow-Hunter) looks pretty ridiculous too.
(The compliation images are all the female cards and armours in the game atm.)
It is kind of amazing to see the combination of cutesy text/markup, horrifying monsters and painfully generic sex-sells outfits that this product has apparently chosen to use.
It’s almost like their whole strategy is “copy a bunch of stuff popular people are doing and hope it sells”.
Started playing Gems of War, and its female outfit situation is pretty dreary.
My “favourites” are the Ice Witch’s floating boob cups and the armour-clad green hippo (Sunweaver) with the random boob window. Though the balloon-boobed snow leopard (Shadow-Hunter) looks pretty ridiculous too.
(The compliation images are all the female cards and armours in the game atm.)
It is kind of amazing to see the combination of cutesy text/markup, horrifying monsters and painfully generic sex-sells outfits that this product has apparently chosen to use.
It’s almost like their whole strategy is “copy a bunch of stuff popular people are doing and hope it sells”.
– wincenworks
Posted on
Posted on
Half mark on Boobplate because well she has half a boob plate… I guess it’s to protect her lucky lung (and/or boob)? Unfortunately Phoebe’s design gives me so many flashbacks to Zarya and disappointment nobody wants to learn from Ellie.
– wincenworks
Posted on
Posted on
Indivisible is a crowd-funded RPG by the creators of Skullgirls, the project was successfully funded and flooded our inbox with requests for commentary. It opened up with the trailer below, and revealed more info and characters as it reached funding goals.
Now, as you can see the cast game has a very diverse cast both in terms of demographics, and in quality of attire.
While overall it’s easy to see why so many people are getting excited about this, a couple of major issues jumped out at me. So, for now, I’m going to address the matters that are specific to BABD in very broad strokes.
(Obviously this is based entirely off the crowdfunding campaign, since the game isn’t released yet)
Things that are awesome, specifically related to the blog:
Phoebe’s outfit seems to be ridiculously sexualized, as though to compensate the audience for her being bulky in size
Anja’s transformation in the in game footage doesn’t seem anywhere near as intimidating or powerful, rather more of a cutesy palette swap
Qadira doesn’t appear on the line-up above because she was one of the last characters to be revealed.
Conventional sexy ladies seemed to be prioritized up the front of the line-up, to the extent Thorani’s gets dangerously close to the women as reward trope.
Pretty much all the guys have weapons and/or obvious martial abilities while Thorani, Yan, Phoebe, Zahra and Nuna (ie most of the female early release Incarnations) look support or non-combative roles
I have no idea what is going on with Yan’s costume… it looks suspiciously like like a Playboy Bunny outfit.
So overall, there’s some really cool stuff and I can really see why many people are super hyped up for this game, but in the context of the issues this blog examines, there are some big problems here.
Some of them might get changed before release, but a lot of them are also with how they choose to pitch this game.
I’m sure that most people who have seen/read Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell and/or remember reading 80s manga might also have a recollection of his other work, Appleseed. It’s rather similar in theme and style to the former, but its female lead, Deunan, has better fitting costumes that have the added bonus of actually looking like something a soldier would wear in a war zone:
But of course, because it’s a Shirow work, it also features scenes where her costume (and other characters) is of the Unrealistically Tight but “Still Sexy” variety as well as spine benders and crotch huggers:
The new anime reboots (going from Appleseed XIII, Ex Machina, and Alpha) have chronologically progressed from mostly keeping her original costume intact to “I give thee a cleavage window, a bared midriff, and a set of completely pointless suspenders and corset thing because fuck you”.
And speaking of Alpha…
I’m sure that not even vacuum sealing yourself into that monstrosity would be enough to explain where a human waist goes or why a butt has to lifted so damn high.
If I wasn’t told it was a costume, I would have assumed the figure on the left was some sort of humanoid robot.
I can certainly understand why they want to get rid of the 80s hair, that’s a tad dated. But I really don’t think that this is really an improvement:
Which probably explains Deunan’s expressions in all the promo shots:
I’m sure that most people who have seen/read Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell and/or remember reading 80s manga might also have a recollection of his other work, Appleseed. It’s rather similar in theme and style to the former, but its female lead, Deunan, has better fitting costumes that have the added bonus of actually looking like something a soldier would wear in a war zone:
But of course, because it’s a Shirow work, it also features scenes where her costume (and other characters) is of the Unrealistically Tight but “Still Sexy” variety as well as spine benders and crotch huggers:
The new anime reboots (going from Appleseed XIII, Ex Machina, and Alpha) have chronologically progressed from mostly keeping her original costume intact to “I give thee a cleavage window, a bared midriff, and a set of completely pointless suspenders and corset thing because fuck you”.
And speaking of Alpha…
I’m sure that not even vacuum sealing yourself into that monstrosity would be enough to explain where a human waist goes or why a butt has to lifted so damn high.
If I wasn’t told it was a costume, I would have assumed the figure on the left was some sort of humanoid robot.
I can certainly understand why they want to get rid of the 80s hair, that’s a tad dated. But I really don’t think that this is really an improvement:
Which probably explains Deunan’s expressions in all the promo shots:
We regularly get people rushing to tell us all about the existence the muscle curiass and about Picts fighting naked, with the assumption that we will embrace these cherries of history and support bikini armor for women.
But I say – why stop there? Why should we be happy with this level of empowerment mostly appearing only in art galleries and wonderful collections like these? Think of all the designs this could inspire!
Why don’t we ask developers to look to classic works of art for inspiration. Just remember the golden rule of marketing.
We regularly get people rushing to tell us all about the existence the muscle curiass and about Picts fighting naked, with the assumption that we will embrace these cherries of history and support bikini armor for women.
But I say – why stop there? Why should we be happy with this level of empowerment mostly appearing only in art galleries and wonderful collections like these? Think of all the designs this could inspire!
Why don’t we ask developers to look to classic works of art for inspiration. Just remember the golden rule of marketing.
