Since the game tries so hard to avoid showing Pyra's costume in serious scenes it really makes me wonder why the hell that design was even green lit in the first place.
Yeah, I think that's what bothers me the most about this. Like, you see a costume like Pyra and you expect gratuitous cheesecake everywhere, a constant, voyeuristic focus. Instead you get lots of extreme facial closeups and seeming active avoidance of ever showing her lower back whenever possible on account of those shorts cover
nothing.
The only time I feel like I'm getting full body shots of her are when things are at a significant distance, in shots with multiple characters or where she has to directly interact with someone, or during action scenes--and the action scenes feel framed more conservatively than even Hollywood films tend to be with regard to how they treat her body. Even the shots that do wind up looking a little skeevy can almost all be theoretically justified through other reasoning--the waking up in a lap scene is a stock Japanese scene for exhibiting emotional intimacy, for instance (the blur on her face lasts for the duration of an eyeblink and then she's fully in focus, for the record. I had to rewatch it to even confirm the blur happened. Not that the scene wasn't still egregious as hell.)
I've seen a lot of pandery anime trash in my day, willingly even, and this does not feel like it's framed like your everyday pandery anime trash.
I'm sure some will inevitably get a different read of this than I am, but from my end everything about the production from writing to direction seems to be attempting to treat Pyra with respect any character ought to be due, actively working around her design to try and mitigate the damage it inherently does. It makes the entire thing feel schizophrenic, which I guess makes sense for a game with a dozen plus different character designers ranging from relative household names to literal pornographers.
It's really, really weird.
Like, I'd almost prefer for someone to come in here and tell me I'm an idiot who can't parse framing or direction and am willfully ignoring a bunch of dubious trashy camera creeping along with an academic rundown of how Literally Objectively Wrong my read is at this point because that would make
more logical sense than what I feel like I'm actually experiencing, here.