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A new wave of outrage is circulating on Twitter. Castlevania: Belmont's Curse is being criticized for Rose Belmont being insufficiently attractive. Hades II was also dredged up as an example of a game with unattractive characters in the same style, prompting the lead artist of the latter to clarify she wasn't responsible for Castlevania.
I personally do not think every woman in a videogame has to be designed as goon fuel, like Aerith and Tifa in the remake, 2B or half the cast of Overwatch. What surprises me is the ferocity with which the supporters of Hades and BC defend the artwork and decry the label of "safe horny" (which, as I understand, means technically, but not viscerally, attractive).
Hypothesis 1: they sincerely prefer this style and cannot understand why anyone would not like it. Maybe it's a learned preference.
Hypothesis 2: it's a form of "every woman is a 10" defense. They cannot say they wanted to have more diverse levels of attractiveness in games, because they implicitly agree that attractiveness can be ranked by saying it, and agreeing to this is very chud-coded.
Hypothesis 3: because some of the hecklers said the women in both games look trans, they cannot backtrack without losing face, because this would mean agreeing that transwomen are less attractive.
The same reason why the chuds defend "their" games from woke hecklers who want more diversity. Even if they wouldn't mind a bit more diversity, surrender to the people who hate you and don't participate in your hobbies anyway (or participate in all the wrong ways) is a mistake.
From my perspective, more likely than not a partisan criticising a piece of media based on political aesthetics - from either side - is likely to be retarded and shouldn't be listened to if we are to enjoy good shit.
What is the benefit of games portraying human demographics as if they were set in New York of today? You could argue that a game might go overboard with sex appeal and just look sillly, but I can't think of a game that would be improved with more of human races that did not develop it, being represented in it. In fact, the opposite is true: games that have no internal reason why racial diversity must be present in every village of 5 NPCs, still having it, for purely ideological reasons.
What is the benefit of games portraying women as if they're all gorgeous bombshells? Is making every woman beautiful a non-ideological choice?
Because people like looking at gorgeous women, the same way they like playing games that are fun. Is making games fun an ideological choice? You can argue such a case, and the more arty critics sometimes do, but it requires blinding yourself to a fundamental reality about what players want and how the world is.
The end point of this logic is that endless stream of Japanese media where all the characters are hot teenagers and everybody’s depressed their whole lives because media overfocuses on romanticizing like a 3 year period before adult life begins.
If games only feature hot young adults they miss out on telling stories about the middle aged, the old, the ugly, children, the disabled, and those are often some of the most interesting stories in any literary canon.
The end point of that logic is modern literary fiction and it's so laser-focused on 'realism' that they deliberately deprive you of any aspirational figure. Every book is about foreigners, cripples, trans, peasants, adulterers and the depressed, and nobody gets a decent plot or anything to look up to.
Taking off my cheeky hat, though, I would say two things:
For a non-sexy version of this question, I don't know if you've come across Hollow Knight: Silksong? The long-awaited sequel to beloved indie hit Hollow Knight. In this case they asked themselves "Should games be fun?" and came to the conclusion that their game is about a society that bleeds pilgrims dry pursuing a hopeless goal, and so their game should be really really hard and punishing and make you wonder why you're bothering. Unsurprisingly, most people really didn't like it. Fans of Hollow Knight like myself had waited a decade and got something miserable and unfun, and the very limited artistic merit of the scenario did not even slightly make up for the fact that the thing was viscerally frustrating in a not-good way.
Or:
is fine,
can be a fair tradeoff for the right audience,
is likely to go down badly. Especially as a sequel to something that was
Art: 6/10 Visceral fun: 8/10.Taking your game from being pretty & fun to less pretty & fun, without having a compelling (to your audience) artistic reason for doing so, is just shooting yourself in the face.
Personally I would explain Silksong's slight decrease in customer score to be entirely explainable by a few people being pushed away by the difficulty starting at a point of "let's keep going from the assumption that you've been able to beat the original Hollow Knight"
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