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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.
People like hot characters in media. Actors for Hollywood movies are very much not a representative sampling of American body types. The male actors bulk and cut and many are clearly on gear. So every Disney Marvel movie you get to see the cut lead male with his shirt off. The female lead will also be unusually hot compared to the median person.
I'm fine with more "normal" looking people in media. Zendaya is not a big-breasted hottie and that's fine. Let's get more actors like that. And stop making the guys cut so hard to have chiseled abs.
I played Diablo 2 Resurrected a bit and the player characters look a bit different than the original. The druid is older and a bit haggard for instance. If they had similarly made the female PCs less hot I'd be fine with that. They didn't of course.
Doesn't that mean that Diablo 2 redesigns were made with different motivation than the usual "auntify women, leave men the same"?
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I am reminded of Jeff Maurer.
For better or for worse, people like looking at hot people, and in any business trying to attract and keep a mass audience, that means you need hot people. Or drawings of fictional hot people, as the case may be.
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The amazon definitely got the man-face treatment. The sorceress and assassin also got more conservative outfits, and they appear a bit older. The assassin also got reworked, the original is more of a femme fatale, and they race-swapped her to Asian.
Comparison image here - reddit link.
I remember people being mildly annoyed about it when the game came out, but they didn't do anything too crazy, so it was mostly just grumbling.
Geeze Amazon really got hit hard. I didn't recall that from the character selection screen.
Looking at that image what stands out most is how much the barbarian shrunk in every dimension. This kind of exaggerated game is the one place they should most have over the top huge muscular men. Strange they got rid of that but kept the idealized figures for the women.
Wtf are you talking about? They absolutely did not keep the idealised figures for the women. They didn't for the men as you noted but they didn't for the women either.
It seems to me that they mostly just went for a more realistic style and tying the characters to real world ethnic groups more closely, regardless of whether that adhered well to the previous design or not.
But they left the women's figures alone. Still narrow waisted and with the same bust sizes and tight tops. All the faces aged male and female alike.
No they didn't, are you blind?
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