The hilarious front line in the tragic war against ridiculous female armor
Tag: sideboob
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Powdered ShitBrown Dust Brave Nine, Part 1: Frellea
Speaking ofBrown D… I mean Brave Nine, whatever the changes to the game’s name, story and character roster, it still remains a confusing mess, seemingly made only for the sake of its exploitative waifu art. So of course I proposed to Icy that we stream redesigns from it! We’re definitely alright after staring at them for hours ?
This character is Frellea, older sister to the backstory comic’s protagonist demigoddess Eda and, I guess, from how well-endowed she is, a very powerful deity. I think, judging by character names (is Frellea a corrupted take on Freya?), they’re Norse mythology-inspired, like Odin’s Sphere’s butt-wing Valkyrie. And of course, literally nothing else about the designs communicates that.
It was SO HARD to decide what should take priority in fixing this mess, but the mix of boobplate and scalemailboobsocks went first. I reshaped her breastplate into something plausible and decided to extend the scalemail into a long-sleeved tunic (though that one’s tight fit is mostly my artistic license).
Next step was to tidy up the messy design composition, including the color scheme. Both me and Icy concluded those huge feathery… trains? tails? were purely decorative, so we got rid of them. I decided to balance out the contrast by making that ribbon white (instead of the shade shade of grey as her hair), reusing redness of the other ribbon (and the feathers) on new pants and, most of all, recoloring her non-mail armor to brass color of her bracers.*
Easily one of my favorite redesigns, but also one of the most work-intensive ones, too. Hope you enjoy it!
~Ozzie
PS: *In the comic the helmet and greaves are slightly different metal shade from the rest of armor, so it seems like different artists couldn’t agree on the color. Pic below, for the interested.
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‘Brown Dust’s (now renamed to Brave Nine) Kiria. Hope you didn’t think the other bingos we did for this game were the worst they got!
Based on her description blurb, I think she is an ex-patrol guard in an empire, turned…. assassin? Which her design definitely communicates. Um. She’s the “black scorpion” which is on her scarf. And her entire ass being out I guess communicates her… desire for justice being loud and clear. Or something. I’m also not super sure how her ass is turned 90 without the rest of her leg rotating also… We’ll chalk it up to ninja powers.
And this is the less ridiculous (though not by much) version of her. Behold, the “improved” version!
The only thing that got an upgrade is that scorpion hood, and it doesn’t even look that good.
Could you guys cover something about Angela in the new Trials of Mana game? Ive been playing it but its honestly difficult just because every time I look at her outfits it makes less sense! Although I dont think Riesz is any better…
A spell-caster lady in a video game who dresses for the beach? It’s more likely than you think! This is from the recent remake, where you would think the developers would want to modernize their designs.
You would think.
The red is her original outfit (pictured above the bingo), which is apparently the outfit a magician from a cold country wears (even though it’s in magical spring, but it’s still described as cold). The blue are added in from her worst class option… the magus.
Why have nice things when you can cry over the sympathy pains of imagining scale mail on your crotch?
-Icy
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Contrary to her appearance, Arnice here is not in fact another card from Granblue Fantasy; she is actually the protagonist of a real RPG, Nights of Azure, where she transforms into various demon forms to fight things. This post is only about her main look, because each of her 5 alternate forms can warrant its own bingo.
Her design reminds me a bit of Velvet from Tales of Berseria, except they have the opposite problem in the front: Velvet has a bare stomach, and Arnice has bare sides and back. I suppose that putting them together will make one good design, at least from the waist-up.
Also, I checked whether that tiny piece of black fabric on her hips is a skirt or shorts, and it’s a skirt, because of course.
I feel ya, Dorothy, I am also appalled at what passes for clothing in Zenescope’s Oz. Are clothes taxed per inch of fabric in the West?
Have you ever looked at L. Frank Baum’s books about a land ruled and influenced by strong, complicated women, and thought “man, I wish these characters were drawn like plastic dolls by J. Scott Campbell so I could masturbate to them”? Well then, do we have the series for you!
(We also recommend you find actual people to interact with, we’re worried.)
Not technically armor, but I know 0 people who would wear this fabric scrap in real life. I guess J. Scott Campbell* knows more people than me… who are imaginary. At least Dorothy over there is wearing what might pass for clothes. I don’t even know what to call the Wicked Witch’s…. bodily coverings.
At least the series doesn’t fall into the Evil is Sexy trope, since everyone is barely allowed clothes? Yay?? ?
-Icy
My eyes, upon seeing Zenescope’s idea of what “Kansas Farmgirl” and “Powerful Evil Witch” look like:
~Ozzie
* I realize Campbell may not have had any input on these character designs, but it’s just the sort of thing he would design, so he still gets 0 points.
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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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BattleWrong – We’re sure that Joke hasn’t been done before!
Battlerite’s a bit of a disappointment in its character design. They seem to have cool ideas (for the male characters and Iva), and their art style is cute and colorful… and yet. So why not try to fix some of their more uninspired designs?
Blossom
To be honest, my desire to redesign Blossom was from my deep-seated frustration with animal-looking characters having a humanoid body shape. Why couldn’t she just be like Puss in Boots from the Shrek movies? Just a deer that stands on her back legs, without breasts and a skinny waist and hips. I realize that she’s a “faun” according to the wiki, which means human/animal hybrid, but the fact that she has both hair and fur on her head/face makes it look like they just slapped some tits on an upright deer. Maybe they were going for something new, but boy did it not work.
I tried to give her more clothes at first, but then decided…. screw it. She’s a deer now. Why does she wear clothes? So in the end, I just gave her a simple poncho. I did want to show off her deer-ness, so I left her shoulders uncovered and gave her upper body some fur, so it’s not weird that she has the same on her face.
I also changed her face to be less Generic Cute Girl.
After I finished the edits, we started making jokes about just Photoshopping a deer head on her instead, so I did that. Got some images of a deer and a birb off the internet, and so Blossom’s True Form came to be. (You can still see the lines from the stock image watermark.)
[She’s beauty, she’s grace, she’ll throw an acorn at your face.]
The result is fairly simple and could probably use some embroidery or patches of different-colored cloth, and some people might say this was an easy cop-out on my part. But I just want her to be a deer, not a deer with boobs; is that too much to ask for?
-Icy
Freya
Thing about Freya’s original design is that I don’t actually find it overall bad – the random bikini top that looks like coconut shells strapped to a choker is the only thing that ruins it. As mentioned back when we bingo’d her pre-update design (with even worse, sideboob-y bikini top!), she looks pretty great from waist down. Also, while far from unique, her face shape is allowed to be a tiny bit more angular… when viewed from certain angles, at least.
(basically it’s Zarya level of safe approach to diversity in female facial features – still conveniently attractive and wears makeup, but allowed to have square-ish jawline, given that you tilt your head and squint)
But since I couldn’t spend 2 hours of stream only painting her a decent top, I decided to build upon what’s there and add some more actually distinct features.
Of course, the boobplate had to go first. Since it bore some resemblance to Angela’s (coincidentally, also character associated with Norsemythology), I decided to base Freya’s new breastplate on my earlier Angela redesign. Also a blue tank top matching her bracer and tassets, for minimal layering. Left her shoulders bare, just gave them a tiny bit more heft.
I approached tweaking her face to create a more believable character. No makeup (which, unfortunately made her blue eyes with orange eyebrows stand out less), more prominent freckles, bigger nose, more sunken cheeks… All to create an image of a warrior who’s more concerned with surviving battles than spending hours in front of the mirror.
I’m rather pleased with the subtle changes to this design and my painting technique in this piece. Hope you guys like it too.
~Ozzie
PS: I didn’t know that while doing this redesign, but apparently some genius on Reddit, upon seeing slightly more boob coverage on Freya’s official updated design decided to “fix” her back to her original bikini. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
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Elvenar continues to be the kind of game with very standard, unsexy strategy gameplay and completely unrelated marketing imagery that is basically Fantasy Porn™ (read: standard for web ads).
And this is the sort of design that amazes me. The kind that covers over half of the Female Armor Bingo card, but doesn’t manage to score a single row. All while not being a full body image. We can only assume whether it would score high heels and/or thigh-high boots if we saw more of this poor poor lady.
~Ozzie
That is very uncomfortable-looking bondage clothing
