It plays in the late middle ages and it’s about “fixing” the mistakes that your ancestor made after fooling around with eldritch knowledge. It’s pretty hard, your heros are basically a bunch of dirty jerks with lots of bad quirks and they go insane as often as they die in the dungeons (And they don’t get up once they’re dead).
The game is dark, but it has a pretty neat art style and cool mechanics! You have 14 classes and big chunk of them are female. The classes above this text are all the female classes in the game (Yes, even the plague doctor) and they wear pretty neat armors! You can change their skin and armor color at any time but there are also classes who are POC by default (Like the arbalest).
I think that’s pretty cool because many people say that there should be no POC in Fantasy games because… People of color haven’t been invited yet? Most Fantasy games play in a Europe-like setting (This game too, BTW)? Anyway, I just thought that this character design was worth sharing and I just wanted to hear what you guys think!
I have complicated (yet mostly positive) feelings about Darkest Dungeons, particularly whenever I consider posting about it on a blog devoted to female armor. It’s currently in Early Access, but official release is on the 19th so I guess it’s safe to comment on it.
With the exception of their insistence on all female adventurer breastplates have ridiculously high-profile boobplate they do pretty well, and the female adventurers without breastplates are excellently presented From what I’ve played, there isn’t really any issues associated with gender beyond some of forms of insanity using the standard gendered terms.
But it does have other issues pop up here and there, such as one of the early enemies you meet being Cultists. And well, they look like this:
So it does dip into the “evil is sexy” trope as well… which is kind of odd given the whole theme of the game is that evil is so terrible it will drive you mad.
Neither of these elements is bad enough I’d refer to it as a particularly negative example, but both of them seem to be included completely arbitrarily and seem at odds with the rest of the game.
So Nintendo decided to release alternative outfits for the Zero Suit Samus in new Smash Bros. Their official statement on it goes:
Thanks to the determination of her female designer, these Zero Suit outfits got completed in time. From the ending of Metroid: Zero Mission, here’s Samus in shorts!
You can use the same outfit variations in both the 3DS and Wii U versions.
“Thanks to the determination of her female designer”, huh? What abizzarely specificstatement. Reads more like “See, SEE? Women not only love skimpy outfits on female characters, they personally put them in games! She was DETERMINED to do it, even!”
As for anyone who’d gladly claim that those are canon costumes from her earlier games: YES, THEY ARE. You know what exactly they are in canon? LEISURE OUTFITS. Samus wears them after her mission is over. She’s supposed to chill in those shorts, not fight.
Just the same, Zero Suit is basically underwear to her armor and Zero Mission’s whole point was to play Samus at her most vulnerable.
Again, how does any costume other than power armor make sense in the context of brutal tournament that is Smash Bros games?
Guess the developers still like Samus promotion pics being a major candidate for an eschergirls post.
~Ozzie
I love when companies pretend that female developers have total autonomy over projects – it’s not like they answer to managers and executives who hired them to do a specific task.
It’s not like video games is an industry where employment is highly competitive or that employment in game is renown for being highly demanding at the best of times.
Surely it couldn’t be that these female designers were instructed by male managers and that the company expects their female employees to do this kind of work or find work elsewhere!
– wincenworks
This week’s throwback: why shielding a sexist female character design with “a woman was involved in creating it!” doesn’t really hold up, especially when the marketing department is so obviously desperate to highlight that particular fact.
A follow up on Tales of Berseria’s extremely edgy protagonist, Velvet.
What really gets me here is that Velvet’s outfit before contracting Lycanthropy is infinitely better then this nonsensical combination of belts and scraps of fabric.
