Lol come on. Ivy. Soul Calibur 4. It's impossible not to notice
Kotaku | At E3, SoulCalibur's Objectified Women Felt Like A Relic Of The Past
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And yet Bamco can't figure out if they want people really take things seriously as a fighting game or whether they want it to be a silly fighter meant of casual play where you can draw dicks on the screen and everyone laughs.
This is one of the bigger problems with SC6. It's a soft reboot, they can do whatever they want tonally, but they chose to go back to 1999 while keeping the 2018 boob worship. ::Shrug::
IMO - "the right balance" isn't all the women are in increasingly skimpy gear and all the guys look exactly the same as they always have.
Alright, gotcha. As for myself, the grade of fiction does not matter to me when it comes to objectification.
But is there really a fighting game with identifiable female characters? TLOU 2 is no SF, Tekken, Soul Calibur or otherwise.
I would say more people around the world know Chun-Li than Ellie or Joel combined in TLOU.
As every product, I think is fine for a certain audience to criticize it to be more suited for their tastes, but the maker of the product might ignore that audience if doesn’t feel he can make more money adjusting its products to taste the new audience.
The new audience needs to show that they are a more profitable one than the old one. This happens all the time with all kind of products, is just that this forum have a certain kind of audience which may or not be profitable at all and the company that makes the product may just ignore it.
User banned (5 days): inflammatory strawman, dismissing female representation concerns
I thought objectification was bad because it was too common. Now it's bad because it's not as common as it used to be making it look "out of place."
How about those who are against objectification just say they are against it without trying to attach their rationale to cultural contexts that in the end turn out to be apparently irrelevant for their belief system.
How about those who are against objectification just say they are against it without trying to attach their rationale to cultural contexts that in the end turn out to be apparently irrelevant for their belief system.
Sure, but does that make her identifiable for the female crowd? In a sense of "Oh hey, that could be me" rather than "Yeah, I know this character". Granted, Chun-Li is one of the more harmless characters and also the female poster girl of the series, but then there is Cammy, Mika or Elena among others, neither of which were designed with women in mind.
Well, there's two things I'd consider here:
1.) Soul Calibur is a franchise that has been consistently trending downward since the soaring heights of 2.
2.) The market for fighting games in the west dwarfs the market for fighting games in Japan.
Mind you, I'm not promising you that if you take the game as is and remove any and all sex appeal that you can then just kick back and watch the money come pouring in because being the weird fanservice game is the only thing holding it back. However, I don't really think that there's a strong case here to think that you have to placate your existing, dwindling fanbase because that's where all the money is. And if your thought process is "well things might get even worse if we tone down the sex appeal" then I think you're on pretty shaky ground to greenlight the game in first place.
In that respect are any characters identifiable from fighting games? I'm not so sure that being able to self identify is even a specific goal of the genre.
I said it never bothered me, I didn’t say I didn’t notice Ivy’s sexy costume. My point was that besides her costume it’s not like the characters were bending over doggy style or stuff like that like you’d see in DOA and it’s offshoots.
Ah I see what you're saying.
Unfortunately, I'm not really equipt to answer it. But I will say, I would 1.) hope so and 2.) would hope that developers would strive to make more identifiable female characters in the future.
I mean, it was, and it is.
I think they are? I mean, one of the lynchpins of this conversation is that everyone else is walking away from objectification in the fighting game space except for Bamco, who's leaning super hard into it and creating something that looks way different than everything else, both for better and for worse.
I personally don't take any more issue with it in the game than I do with Bayonetta. I feel that it is more tongue-in-cheek than titillating, and to an extent I think there's a place for it in games as much as any other medium. Seeing how even including it in the game made it seem like a "relic from the past" speaks volumes on the progress over the last few years..
This is a really good point. The Souls series was really at its peak during SC2, and it saw another spike in sales with SC4 (due to the inclusion of console exclusive Star Wars characters). I feel more than fan service turning off casual consumers (because real talk, the vast majority of casual gamers are nowhere near that critical about the media they consume), is the feeling of stagnation that comes off from SCIV.
I mean, I know the mechanical differences from V to VI because I follow the game, but your average console owner is gonna take a look at the game and say "This looks just like Soul Calibur V from the 360" and move on.
I'll never be as buff as Kazuya, schooling fools while donning a suit. But I sure as hell would like to. On the other hand, what woman would like to be like Cammy, going into battle showing off her ass for everyone to see? It's not about what's achievable, but what is desirable as a power fantasy. Most female designs, unlike male ones, simply fail on that front. And the reason for that is that they are designed as a sexual fantasy for men, rather than a power fantasy for women.
I mean, how exactly is it tongue in cheek?
Bayo certainly is, it celebrates using sexuality as a weapon, gives context to her outfits or lack there of, spends a lot of time defining the characters within, why they are the way they are, why they speak the way they speak.
Where does SC do that?
Can't fucking believe Mika doesn't have an Asuka DLC costume yet...
Ivy's full on dominatrix combat moves certainly give me a tongue in cheek vibe. With someone like Sophitia it feels more out of place.
I'm not equipped to answer that question in totality, but I'd guess the answer might be proportional to the number of Cammy cosplayers out there. All in all that might not be a large fanbase but it seems there is a fanbase for the character that includes some women, outfit and all.
Mmm...I'll just say I disagree. I don't think it goes far enough to be fully tongue in cheek so much as it's just playing on a trope it doesn't seem to really understand.
That being said...
Maybe it is.
There's a difference between glorifying and objectifying. We can glorify a woman without making her sole purpose of existence the concept of titillating the audience.
I dont really mind it but never understood why they went that far with 4. And it's not about being sexy, the women in SC2 were more sexy imo, giving them enormously big boobs and making their costumes like underwear is bad aesthetic and it feels like the game is made for perverts and not fighting gamers.
Thank you.
This, right here. I want to be able to play characters that I feel using as my 'avatar', so to speak. If I have to resort to character creation to get what I want, the character designers have already failed.
Already, there is a distinct lack of muscle on the female cast which is a huge red flag. I pretty much ALWAYS have to resort to character creation just to have a female character who actually looks like she can fight. It's depressing. Where's my power fantasy, Bamco?
Someone
Just
Really
Liked
Big
Anime
Titties
Whenever you have to ask why when it comes to these sort of designs, just remember...
Yeah but imagine a world where you turn on your TV to watch the news, and the anchorwoman is wearing a bikini while the anchorman wears a suit and tie.
That's what the videogame industry needs to move away from.
It's not even an anime looking game, it's supposed to be realistic.. :(
Anyway I think at least they have toned it down in 6.
Outside of some extra cloth on the sides of her top (that get broken off), doesn't she almost have the same design as II?
It has. Fanservice content in games is getting rarer and rarer. That's why people who like fanservice latch onto what's left and celebrate it.
Uh, citation needed. There's still plenty of fanservice in video games. This sort of siege mentality thing is self-defeating imo.
She does, but that's pretty much the core of the complaint the article centers around.
Isn't SCVI being a "relic" at e3 kind of proof of that?
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E3 was primarily fanservice free. That's literally the whole point of this thread...how uncommon a game with fanservice is these days.
I feel like it's a staple of the character, something most people would expect to see. Putting more clothing on her wouldn't hurt, but I don't think its quite as fair to harp on Ivy when there's other series that i feel objectify women even worse with little to no response.
Mostly women, if you read this thread and the actual article.Though there are a good chunk of men too in this thread that get it
Are you seriously suggesting that reducing women to sex objects is somehow glorifying us? like... what?
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What games or series did we see in E3 that used to have fanservice and toned it down? Western or not.
Pretty good article. It's not like there can't be a level of sexiness in a game, but Soul Calibur feels like it devolved devolving into some teenager hormones fueled playboy fantasy that never grew up and just doubled downed on it. The older I got the more awkward Soul Calibur got.
I couldn't help but roll my eyes by Okubo responses, I probably would have more respect if he just stated he simply like T&A a lot honestly, just get it out of the way than dodge answers.
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I couldn't help but roll my eyes by Okubo responses, I probably would have more respect if he just stated he simply like T&A a lot honestly, just get it out of the way than dodge answers.
.........
E3 main focus nowadays is mostly games with a heavy western focus, which yeah have been getting better over the years at decent representation of women in games. Not arguing against that.
Just pointing out there's still plenty of fanservice
Mortal Kombat 9 to Mortal Kombat X comes to mind. Look at Sonya in 9 compared to Sonya in X.
The first time they showed the game and sophitia was in it I was like "okay there's some conspicuously big boobs in this game." Things are changing and it's different than it would have been 10 years ago.
Things are changing. Used to be able to shrug that off easier. If bamco thinks it's better for the game then that's their prerogative but I kind of have my doubts. You could say it does seem like a relic.
Things are changing. Used to be able to shrug that off easier. If bamco thinks it's better for the game then that's their prerogative but I kind of have my doubts. You could say it does seem like a relic.
I guess they mean good fanservice games, lol.
I could understand the appeal for a game with a sexy characters (Skullgirls is one of my favorite fighters), but they also need to deliver graphically and gameplay wise. Like you couldnt pay me to play something like Senran Kagura, its way low budget kusoge for me.
I meant this past E3 specifically but yeah, MK has improved a lot.
I know you're banned, but Kayane got her fair share of sexist comments through her life and career, and I'm sure she still does from time to time. What a stupid take.
As someone, who hasn't played in nearly a decade, no, I don't want more change. I want that familiar old experience with shiny new graphics. SCV tried changing up the roster dramatically, and I didn't like it.
You're right that the costume design is basically the same as SC2, but Sophitia's still got her more curvy SCIV proportions squeezed into them.