So, recently League of Legends decided to release this origin story for Lux, which has really helped showcase how terrible her design is in comparison to that of… well the rest of her culture. Right off the cover makes it look like she’s the princess to be rescued, not the heroine to reach her potential.
The best thing that can be said about this comic is that they’re depicting her within the society she supposedly came from: it’s now well illustrated how tacky and impeding that shitty boobplate would be.
If it wasn’t for the title, you’d assume this was actually a story where Garen was the hero for baby sitting a generic damsel in distress… Which is kind of horrifying when you realize Lux has been in the game for eight years, and somehow fixing her design or evolving her default into something better has never occurred to the folks in charge.
– wincenworks
The design process for this definitely not sexualized, because not skimpy (?) “armor”:
- Draw a naked chick, make sure her (obviously nipple-less) breasts have an amazingly implausible shape.
- Add the tiniest hint of texture (and little to no volume) on parts that you think might need to pass as armored (hence the boobplate).
- Loincloth/buttflap for modesty.
- Literally everything else: fill in with non-flesh colors!
- Profit?????
~Ozzie
A random game ad I found long ago… somewhere. I don’t really think this deserves any actual credit or research, considering this seems like a generic asset flip-type game web ad, including a cringy, vaguely sexual tagline!
The outfit, though, I think, justified doing a bingo. It’s basically a one big “don’t” in dos and don’ts of costume design.
She’s clearly a magic user, though, why would she need clothes that make any sort of sense or keep her warm? Maximal skin exposure, with complete disregard for functionality and physics, is all that matters!
? </sarcasm>
~Ozzie
One of these things is not like the other~
Definitely not a high-scoring design, but it’s still baffling enough that I wanted to showcase it. This is Clery the cleric high priestess from a recently-released JRPG named Azure Saga: Pathfinder (as the logo says).
Besides the lack of pants, or even a skirt really, and the top ripped off from another franchise with Pathfinder in the name… it’s just not cohesive as a design? It isn’t even an aesthetically-pleasing excuse for cleavage.
We seem to have feathers as a motif, but it’s like it got forgotten halfway through. There’s no consistent shapes aside from the (apparently) holy symbol, except then there is a different symbol on her shoulder. And the “how does it attach” square is marked specifically for that pauldron being hot-glued to her skin, presumably. (In her in-game sprite, her sleeve is attached to it and it looks better, even though it still wouldn’t be useful as armor without further support.)
At least she’s not wearing heels, but her boots look like the last thing to be designed, when they had no ideas left.
On a positive note, this might make good livestream material, along with one of the other lady characters in this game:
Oh no, is that a Green Archer Lady??
-Icy
De-failing League of Angels Part 2: The Angel of my Personal Hell
You’d think I would have learned my lesson, regarding picking The Worst Things for redesigns, but not before I had to fix this!! I didn’t even have alcohol to keep me company while I worked on it.
I’ll start by briefly noting that every redesigned element, besides the face, took up to 4 tries to figure out, just in terms of shapes alone! I wanted to keep certain elements from the original, such as that belt motif, so I spent a lot of time just trying to figure out what the hell I could do with them. At least one ended up in a weird place.
I will also say that while working on this piece, I decided that this character feels more like an agender rather than a woman angel, so they’re agender now. On that note, let’s begin with what I loved working on the most: the face. I made the eyebrows and nose more interesting, made the makeup more gender-neutral, and changed the palette. Definitely one of my favorite and least painful edits.
After doing that… I just changed everything else about the design! Oh, except I did keep the foorwear and the arms. The under-boobs belt became a breastplate, with the crotch armor (?) belt thing incorporated into it. The cloth thingie hanging off the crotch armor (?) got moved up to probably be part of some shirt under the breastplate.
Everything besides that is me exercising my painting and suffering skills, so y’all better appreciate it. I decided to go with some gambeson for the legs, instead of our regular poofy pants, because the cloth thingie was conflicting with the poof. I added black pants and a similar undershirt visible in the armpit to tie the design to the background a bit. Also, I needed another color besides light grey, sky blue, and white. The original palette is pretty limited when you’re not distracted by the tiddy.
My rendering skills are obviously not as good as the artist for the original, but I tried (Oh my God, did I try). And I do believe that at least in the design aspect, my reworking is an improvement.
Bonus closeup of the breastplate because it sucked to work on.
-Icy
De-failing League of Angels Part 1: Stabby leather lingerie
Apparently we felt like taking a challenge the day we made those edits, because, well, it’s League of Angels, the epitome of creative bankruptcy in video game marketing.
What I decided to redesign was this extra-stabby leather… um… outfit that I bingo’d before.
After the initial shock of how uncomfortable that “armor” must be, the literally biggest thing that caught my attention in this artwork were her thighs. HOW FREAKING HUGE ARE THEY IN PROPORTION TO THE REST OF THE BODY? Unfortunately this seemed mostly like an epic fail at foreshortening rather than an attempt at ‘thicc’ fetish, let alone at earnest fat representation… So I decided to reverse that.
Instead of shrinking the thighs to give her conventionally attractive model proportions, I readjusted the rest of the body to fit them, resulting in a chubbier figure.
Her arms now have some heft and her head isn’t tiny anymore.
Though most important changes went into the torso, which now has a human-sized waist and connects to other body parts at humanly possible angles, instead of those of a Tetris puzzle.
I am very satisfied with what I managed to do with that shameless boobplate. The idea was to still have it be a breast-oriented armor without making it look like two coconut halves with extra-emphasis on cleavage, and while retaining as much of the original’s decorative aesthetic. Basically a more sophisticated attempt at what I did with Regime Wonder Woman waaay back.
I also slightly reshaped the stabby laced leather part under it, because it looked cool enough… just not on bare skin. Speaking of which, of course there was no way I left this poor woman with no padding, so in place of all this pale skin I painted white gambeson, retaining the original color scheme. She also now has full leather pants, because why wouldn’t she?
All in all, I think I managed to improve this image significantly. Not all edits are seamless, but I’m quite proud of the way they came out. How do you guys like it?
~Ozzie
Okay, so I know what you’re thinking – this game that is named uncomfortably close to the female wing of the Hitler Youth but is probably aimed to capitalize on League of Angels is clearly just a cheap porn game right?
Well, based off the visuals yes… but if you were were using a screen reader you’d be forgiven for understanding it was going to be an action orientated first/third person shooter (though according to the Twitter it’s a superheroine game, and the Steam “mature content” screen says battle arena) and even though the game isn’t out their site advertises:
- A comic book series (so you can get the heroine’s origin story)
- A series of novels (so that you can understand the lore)
- Merchandise (so you can wear your love of the above in public)
That and well, this is not the first time it’s appeared on BABD… in fact it’s got a little bit of a history – but it’s still not out yet. The actual core product itself is not for sale two and a half years later. It’s like the opposite of asset flips and shovelware yet somehow worse.
Of course, the last patch to the game was over a year ago but apparently it’s coming soon to steam and was high up on the “female protagonist” tag search.
So glad that Steam doesn’t see the need to do any manual curating.
– wincenworks