I tried to get into Disgaea despite really disliking the character designs but I just couldn't do it. :/
Aveline is such a good character that gets forgotten in the disdain for DA2.
I'm extremely thankful that I've spent so long in that hole that it doesn't really bother me anymore even if it's, from an academic standpoint, awful to consider that I've basically been desensitized to the pandering by now. It's sort of like that moment where you realize that you've watched so much anime that the sense of humor has actually started to click with you--a beneficial thing, but one that comes with a pretty sizeable dose of shame and self-loathing. I don't feel like it would be a stretch to say that by western standards it's a culture (or subculture) that literally doesn't understand the core conceit of how humor is supposed to work. Something weird happening and then someone saying out loud that the weird thing happened in a shaken voice is not a joke, dammit! It just isn't!
I'll always contend that for any (holy mother of god so many) problems I have with DA2's actual mechanical and narrative execution, the core conceit of it is one of the strongest concepts I've ever seen for an RPG, and some of that shines through despite itself. Aveline's entire story arc is one of those things. Also literally everything else about her.
Yeah, Tactics Ogre is probably the closest analog to Fire Emblem, and even it is much closer to Final Fantasy Tactics in design than in the simple triangle-based (rock-paper-scissors) battle system of Fire Emblem. There is really nothing quite like the combination of what Fire Emblem put together, and it's unfortunate that the design has declined into such an obviously pandering, shallow aesthetic.
The fact that this isn't a thing yet is beyond disappointing.
It's bizarre that so few fantasy RPGs do it, they seem stuck on the idea of a journey across lots of different types of terrain (forest, desert, caves, mountain etc) to offer variety, and then you reach a city after three minutes walking across the 'great plain' that has all of a dozen houses. Most of the tabletop RPGs I've played over the years have been set in a single city, it's possible for different areas to have completely different vibes without resorting to such well-trod themes as the elements or the most 'exciting' part of a settlement being it's ludicrously over-sized sewer system.
Well, can Sims 4 count for that? They brought in a giant Gender Patch, where a sim can use either gender clothes/hair/makeup, can set a different body type from gender (can chose a feminine body for a male sims, and vice versa), and can enable whether a sim pees sitting or standing or enable whether a sims can get pregant or get other sims pregnant or neither. I don't think I've ever seen another game include so many options for gender, specially so detailed.
I keep forgetting about Sims because... well, EA. But you know, it is good that they more or less do offer androgynous options for shaping the face and body (not to mention all of the gender option stuff).
I'm actually going to pull from an unfortunately shortlist of Fate designs I like and use Mordred's armor as an example. It is a gendered design since the faulds are elongated to evoke the look of a dress however I think it really works here because this stylistic choice dosen't undermine the fact that it is armor. In fact the character is more armored because of it. The heels are eh, but not deal breaking for me.
It sucks that her unarmored designs and the series she comes from are bad. Though weirdly enough her and Astolfo (A guy in a dress) are the only things I really ended up liking from that series.
Speaking of Fate and gacha, I find the armored Knights of Round in Fate/Grand Order really cool:
Artoria is the one in the middle. She pretty much gets the same armor treatment as the rest.
But of course, the men get more armored and clothed as they level up, while the women are the opposite.
As much as recent Atelier games have had bits and pieces of skeevy content, a CG here and there, a few designs, some DLC outfits--it's always been a series with a primary female target demographic trying to reach into the otaku money pit as best it can without fully alienating, which I think has done it pretty well at mitigating its backslide where some other series have just gone completely mad. More importantly, I feel like for anybody who's over the hump and acclimated to Japanese tropes and character writing quirks, the actual writing in a lot of the games is absolutely stellar at moments, even if it has its more "uhhh..." stuff going on here and there.
Speaking of Fate and gacha, I find the armored Knights of Round in Fate/Grand Order really cool:
Artoria is the one in the middle. She pretty much gets the same armor treatment as the rest.
But of course, the men get more armored and clothed as they level up, while the women are the opposite.
Are any of the recent Atelier series released on PC worth purchasing? I've always been kinda vaguely interested in the Atelier series but have always been pretty back and forth on the designs and the really hammy writing.
Speaking of FGO, I love Raikou but God if she isn't the embodiment of "how do women's bodies work???" in Japanese game design.
Tiny ass waist and neck, humongous breasts with vacuum wrapping, wide hips... Just. I can see why people are put off of FGO, shall we say?
Quoting myself from ~25 pages back because it's relevant again, lol.
It's such a weird thing, that.
The Steam Atelier games are less than perfect (but not disastrous) ports by my understanding, but Atelier Sophie is the start of the most recent trilogy and probably one of the better games to start with. One of the two character designers produces some iffy stuff--this is the most pandery Atelier has gotten to the otaku crowd thus far--and the game's cast is kind of lacking in the strong emotional core that makes the better games more successful (they're largely just nice people being nice and kinda boring) but I thought it was an enjoyable experience overall.
It was such a bizarre bug, that infurated me when I was younger. You had to turn the sound all the way down to mute to finish the damned game.
Speaking of FGO, I love Raikou but God if she isn't the embodiment of "how do women's bodies work???" in Japanese game design.
Tiny ass waist and neck, humongous breasts with vacuum wrapping, wide hips, no shoes... Just. I can see why people are put off of FGO, shall we say?
Speaking of Fate and gacha, I find the armored Knights of Round in Fate/Grand Order really cool:
Artoria is the one in the middle. She pretty much gets the same armor treatment as the rest.
But of course, the men get more armored and clothed as they level up, while the women are the opposite.
Speaking of FGO, I love Raikou but God if she isn't the embodiment of "how do women's bodies work???" in Japanese game design.
Tiny ass waist and neck, humongous breasts with vacuum wrapping, wide hips, no shoes... Just. I can see why people are put off of FGO, shall we say?
Yeah, it's bloody weird. The closest you'll get is generally "cute" races like Lalafell in FFXIV or Lyn in Blade & Soul, and obviously that's incredibly restrictive if you happen to not be a fan of those respective races' aesthetics.
I don't wanna give the impression that Atelier games are ever free of pandering in the modern era, because it's just not a reality of anime games. This stuff is a matter of degrees at this point, and everything is sliding closer to Peak Anime at its own pace as time passes. As far as how much pandering you're gonna get, it depends really heavily on the individual subseries you're playing.
...and this is good to know. Hah.
Wait what that's RAITA'S work?
I'd link you to his twitter so you could witness firsthand just how absurd he's gotten, but I'd literally get banned.
Then please don't. I'll go google fu and witness the horror myself.
I've always been fascinated by androgyny myself, so I know exactly how you feel. I'm happy to hear you were able to find at least one game with it. Was very disappointed to get anywhere close to it in, say, Dragon's Age, I had to make an elf and even then he ended up looking more young than anything... :/
It really doesn't seem like something that'd be that hard to implement but so many devs seem intent on having male characters all have hard bodies and faces and the women all have curves and slender faces. Like you'd think it much easier to just have a default character model and then alter it towards feminity or masculinity rather than having two seperate ones to alter. But I'm not a game designer.
Oh, yeah, the guy wouldn't be so prolific and successful if people didn't want to buy what he was selling, and absolutely ginormous breasts are clearly a thing a lot of people like for what are probably pretty obvious reasons.
I guarantee you that's a thing but I refuse to look for it on principle even though I kind of want to see it now.
i'm having a real tough time trying to figure out how these honking great knockers are supposed to fit in that breastplate, frankly i'm sure she'd be glad to not be trapped in that boob prison at all times.
Japan has to understand the appeal on at least some level - I mean, their boy bands look like this:
Yeah, honestly it surprises me the most that Japanese games don't cater to this kind of stuff with character creation more. Even Xenoblade 2, which is shooting completely for the male shonen and Gacha audiences has Morag in it as far as androgynous characters go. It's not an uncommon archetype at all. Heck, she's even voiced by Mitsuki Saiga for god's sake.
The closest I've seen myself in the games I'm familiar with have been the charr in Guild Wars 2. The female faces have softer features in general, but there are still options that don't look blatantly feminine, and their armors are actually unisex.
