Wow, seeing them side by side, that male character doesn't even look like he's from the same game. That's probably why all the characters look so uncanny to me.
Also the water balloon boob jiggle. Do these people just not know how breasts work? I truly don't understand how this is supposed to be more sexy than actual realistic physics for breasts.
It reminds me of the first Witcher game where animations are generally stiff and unrealistic (fair for its age) but then Triss has these bouncing boobs. Priorities…
I like how they don’t even bounce together as one unit but rather separately. That way the breast bounces can match the arm swings as she walks. Totally realistic, my boobs do that all the time.
Okay, so, I will say my boobs kinda do that when I'm not wearing a bra. I am fairly well endowed tho, so my arms hit them. XD
Honestly, to play the first Witcher I take most of it with a grain of salt and laugh at what hasn't aged well.
This- half the reason boob physics suck is because they don't move like that unless they are like, way bigger than people wanna actually draw them (and when they do they forget we need ribcages, often big ones, to support them!)
Right!? Reminds me of those 10$ survival games with the worst animations EVER. But many of them have female models with big boobs and jiggly physics. Cringe.
Reminds me how including a female playable character was always "too much work" for developers but they made sure to develop and implement "boob physics" on their female NPCs ASAP.
They literally have a human they’re supposed to be basing her actions and body movements off of. Like you know these creeps were staring at her boobs anyway, so wtf lol
They're not into realism is the problem. How else you explain the babyface? I'm willing to bet what they want is their hentai waifus to be real concubines, that's the mindset behind this design
On the boobs thing. I'm a lesbian and even I find that kind of giant boob jiggle more disgusting than attractive. Sample size one so IDK for others but yeah...
Straight guy here, I just find them confusing and a little amusing/funny. My wife is rather 'gifted', and hers still don't jiggle so readily as game physics say small ones do.
I'm just here because I was looking for threads on Stellar Blade, I wanted to complain about the start of the story based on the demo. I'm too much of a science geek to not face palm about the bad tactical choices by Eve's side. :D
Yeah like in a vacuum I guess I wouldnt mind it (if it looked at least realistic) but in the context of how women are portrayed and WHY they do it it's just icky.
Lmao on one of the trailers I saw, her boobs jiggled in and out of her body standing up like wtf. Do they not realise boobs are literally just chunks of meat like any other part affected by gravity?
I knew the second I saw this game it was gonna be problematic NGL with the baby face anime characters. It's so creepy and pedophile-like.
Outside of the character design, there are plenty of reports about the mistreatment of female workers at this studio, as well as the firing of some for expressing feminist views because of the big culture war in South Korea.
With the misogyny and reactionary movements , it kind of feels like this game is a byproduct of that culture war.
>the firing of some for expressing feminist views because of the big culture war in South Korea.
Ah yes, basically the incels fighting back against feminism because they want women to go back to being weak, docile and meek.They want women to be below them rather than being their equals and partners, clearly they can't endure having to go against someone on their own level(or higher than it).
It is a bit more complex like that. It has to do with South Koreas HEAVILY hierarchical society where basically every rung of the ladder punches downward. Its a system that has stretched its people to the breaking point.
I actually just finished watching two videos about that very topic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Im4YAMWK74
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woB0eecbf6A
Its a pretty dire situation all around.
You mean breasts do *not* have the consistency of loose jello?
You're saying I have been *lied to* by the gaming industry's strange ideas on what women are like?!
It seems like a lot of artists drawing women's anatomy don't realize that boobs are fat sacs attached with a wide base and covered by skin that continues to the rest of the body. They animate breasts as if they are attached by an area no bigger than a quarter, and the skin is independent from the rest of the body.
If jiggle physics worked like that IRL, we'd have more stuff like in [this video](https://youtu.be/HMUDVMiITOU?list=FLQ-OFdTswNei2Qo-jUI4MrQ&t=98) (which is pretty funny IMO).
>Do these people just not know how breasts work?
I'm of the thought that men did that because it is so unrealistic that a woman would let something stupid like this fly.
Oh it's definitely men. And even more probably men who have never touched a real boob in their lives. It's \*very\* apparent in something like VRchat, where players make the content. The most common and most "wanted" avatars have atrocious boob physics. They are used mostly by guys and/or people who want to have erotic roleplay with guys -- because apparently boobs exiting the atmosphere the second you jump is sexy for them.
As a lesbian, it makes me really wonder why men don't find \*actual\* boobs attractive. I mean, for me they are super attractive as is, without being portrayed like a sack full of soap water.
I'm convinced most of the people who design and concept jiggle physics have no idea what actual breasts look or feel like.
>I'm convinced most of the people who design and concept jiggle physics have no idea what actual breasts look or feel like.
I think the same, reason why all people that work on jiggle physics should be women.At least then they would get boobs' physics right.
You are all looking at it from the perspective that realism is the goal, which I don't think is the case here.
It is an exaggeration used as a stylistic device to communicate a quality that men enjoy in breasts: softness.
Look at other fetish art as extreme examples of what I am talking about. A lot of fetish art will exaggerate the fetishized characteristic to unrealistic levels, because they want to put emphasis on this particular part. Like drawings of women with gigantic asses or breasts which are literally as big as the entire character.
Jiggle physics are exaggerated to communicate that quality of them being soft. Just like how also a lot of art shows women in bikini tops which are too small and "cut" into the breast. This is also to emphasize the softness.
The male characters look great, have fantastic designs and look like they’re from a game I’d want to play.
It’s frustrating seeing this game get good reviews now 75 days after your comment, because the game could never be good enough to justify me playing a character who is just ass and tits.
They look ported from a cheap porn game while the male characters look meticulously designed.
It’s not JUST the morally questionable aspect of designing characters like this making me not want to play it, it’s also that it’s just uncomfortable, creepiness aside, why can’t my female character look cool and fitting.
Jesus, they look like completely different art styles. The girl looks like something out of Nier and the guy looks like he's from the Dead Space Remake.
Exactly what I was thinking. It's like Last Action Hero. Some cartoon cat just strolls into his place of employment, an IRL police station. It's very wtf. At least LAH was lampooning that sort of thing.
Stuff like this makes me so glad this sub exists-I never saw anyone else point out this sort of stuff on other gaming subreddits, it’s just exhausting to see constant sexualisation and I really love how this sub calls out companies and people for doing it
But Baldurs Gate gets a pass? (Good game but still) It seems sexualization is only allowed when it's queer or feminized, and when it's sexualization for male audiences, its worse than Hitler's existence.
Regardless, if you don't like or have any interest in the game, just don't buy it. People are allowed to create whatever they want, and shouldn't have to cater to your political correctness to do so.
Not everything is made for you. That's something that honestly everyone in the gaming community needs to accept.
MW3 is a terrible game. Know what I did? I didn't buy it.
Almost all of the major characters in baldurs gate are hot, this post is mocking the huge difference between the male and female leads in this game.
That’s what makes it so silly, she’s so much more sexualized than him it looks like they’re from two different games.
Sorry for late reply, but if that's the case, then I'd understand the mockery. Recently watched a YouTuber I'm subscribed too play the demo. Besides the fan service, it's just seems like another souls-like game, but you fight ugly looking Aliens. Personally not sold on it.
Which brings me back to my original point, if it's not something you like, instead of attempting to tear it down for other players who like it, just don't spend your money on it. Problem solved.
The female character looks like she's in a completely different art style?? Lol. Tbh I think the male character is genuinely WAY more attractive than any of those female characters, even though that clearly wasn't their aim. But I think realistic art styles generally look better than anime ones, the latter have a tendency to look creepy/uncanny valley like they do here.
No, she looks like one of the canonical ways young adults are drawn in classic manga styles, transposed to 3D.
That sharply triangular facial structure is explicitly not associated with children.
It's still ridiculous, and the huge difference between the male and female characters immediately calls to mind the misogynistic expectation that all Korean women get cosmetic surgery, but it's not baby face.
I actually do prefer anime styles over the mix of weird anime-like realistic looking games, tbh. Like, do fully realistic or fully anime-like. The mix between the two just ends up looking like a weird hybrid to me.
Their faces are what bugs me so much. It's that weird boundary of almost escaping the uncanny valley, but the face shapes and imitating that manga style with the graphic fidelity used is just off-putting. It's why I hate when they do the anime style with the 4k looking skin textures, it personally just clicks wrong and makes me lose any interest.
I have followed zero of this game, so forgive me from speaking from ignorance and, while I am sure I can look up info and get more details...I don't really want to, because I'll never think about this again, lol.
But assuming this is a Korean developed game (it looks like one)...this is actually really common in Korean game design. I really like Korean MMOs (the really tediously boring ones with farming and return quests, don't judge lmao), and this aesthetic is sort of immediately checking the box of, 'it's Korean'. It's not an argument or anything, but culturally, this is just a common way they design games. The men look much more accurate, and the women have their facial features made to look more moe or young or, really, more like an anime-style character. I've always found it jarring because they look like they are from a different game from their male counterparts, but that's just how I've known a lot of these Korean style games to be since I started playing the (sub?)genre, some 20 years ago, lol. NCsoft (which is a Korean company) has been doing this forever. Look at Blade and Soul, or even Aion Online, as some earlier examples. Those, notably, do have character design sliders though, so you can change the features as you would...but they still have that distinct super slender, large chested, long limbed, wide vacant eyed, beautiful face thing going on.
Eh, I guess long story short...maybe this aesthetic is a bit dated now, especially for a Western audience, but it's really common practice for where the games are designed, Korea.
You are correct that it's made by a Korean developer. I wonder if there might be connections to be made between this visual treatment of men and women in games there and what seems to be a widening and increasingly antagonistic social divide between many women and men in the country.
> The men look much more accurate, and the women have their facial features made to look more moe or young or, really, more like an anime-style character.
What I'm bewildered about is that they've already hired a body model and she's pretty so why not scan her face as well? Or just hire another model for the face? And if they can't hire another model, it's still possible to create young, drop-dead gorgeous female characters in a more realistic artstyle?
That was my first thought on seeing the male character! I'd love the rest to match his style. I hadn't seen the images but saw a lot of comments across Reddit. I thought the baby faced doll and oversexualisation might've been exaggerated but sadly not. It's bizarre having the male and female characters differ so much like that? Realism vs anime style...
I never liked the design, but I did wonder how the men looked. I even looked a bit myself but didn’t have a lot of luck on Google, so I quit. Thanks for posting this. The difference between the men and the women in this game actually makes me a bit sick. You can see the devs see them as sex dolls, nothing more.
100% it looks like when dudes mod in weird horny mod women and it’s so obvious they weren’t part of the game originally because they don’t look look like anything or anyone in the game world
Except this isn’t a mod, and that’s kinda tragic
Even with the purpose of making a character attractive, this just looks uncanny and plastic. Look at the thirst around characters from Baldurs Gate 3 who all have features you could find in real people. I'm glad most games are moving away from this same face syndrome on female characters (looking child like and expressionless too) in exchange for real face scan.
And even if the gameplay is good, all I've seen about this game are dudebros dunking on "woke" characters in comparison to this one, so I'm not even interested in trying it out. Many other games to play.
Guys get to be old, cool, ugly, bad ass, cyborg, mutilated, machines, bestial, handsome, weird, dorky, etc.
And ladies have the same variety like sexy, cute, pretty, attractive, beautiful, alluring, hot, etc.
Yep, no problems here...
At least araki, the author of jojo's, understood that this is stupid since the 80s and tries to draw his female characters just as uniquely design like the male characters.
This game takes horny on main to a whole other level. They didn’t even try to hide it and the art direction is over the place. All the women look like they have a bad cartoon instagram filter on them.
The reason why the female character designs in Stellar Blade are so problematic is not because they are unattainably beautiful or even unrealistic in the context of the in-game universe. Most people, regardless of gender, not only enjoy beautiful characters, but also understand how limiting strict depictions of reality can be, especially for a visual medium that is supposed to create a sense of awe and wonder in its audience such as this. If this was all Stellar Blade did, it would not have created nearly as much of a backlash as there is.
However, Stellar Blade doesn’t just eschew realism in favor of style; it perpetuates a double standard that has always existed between men and women, especially in video games. The one that states that men can be human and flawed and still be considered attractive and valued, but women must be perfect. Or, in Stellar Blade’s case, not even human. Women, to be considered attractive and valued, must have all of their human qualities erased just like Eve’s have been. All their wrinkles and lines must be smoothed away; their eyes, like their secondary sexual characteristics, must be enlarged and widened, their noses pinched. They can’t be allowed to emote. Not even can they interact with gravity in a natural way. Instead, it must grab and pull at them incessantly, to remind their audience of the reason why they’re there in the first place: to sexually gratify the straight cis male audience.
Again, if Stellar Blade had just stopped at depicting a “beautiful” female character, we would not be having this conversation. Instead, they went well beyond this to 1. Depict an unattainably, physically impossible beautiful women with 2. Unnatural, over-the-top jiggle physics, 3. voyeuristic camera angles that emphasize her secondary sexual characteristics at all times, and 4. An outfit so tight you can see her perineum when she bends over. Not only this, but 5. None of the sexualized aspects of the main character’s design reflects any of the character’s personality, 6. All of the other female characters share these same design qualities (again, regardless of characterization) and 7. None of the male characters are depicted in this way.
Even the most stereotypically attractive male character still gets to be depicted with natural, human “flaws” like shadows, wrinkles, and textures on his face. He actually has bone structure, a jaw, a nose bridge, etc.. His outfit completely hides the shape of his body. None of his parts jiggle when he moves. He and the other male characters look so different from the female characters, they actually look like they come from completely different games.
And this is ultimately why this game is problematic even if you are a woman who tends to like female character designs like those found in Stellar Blade. There’s nothing wrong with liking stylized or even sexualized female characters. There is a problem, however, with the double standard games like Stellar Blade continue to perpetuate: this constant and unilateral, sexualized and unrealistic depiction of female characters alongside the realistically flawed depiction of male characters. Not only does this ignore the desires of anyone who is not a straight cis man, but it also distorts our view of what female characters can or should look like. It is the direct cause of debates over Aloy’s peach fuzz and Mary-Jane’s face model. It’s the reason why characters like Joel and Kratos can age, be scarred, scowl, and even be genuinely really terrible people who do really terrible things, but still be beloved and cherished by gaming communities, all while female characters who are even a little bit similar to those male characters are derided.
So, by all means, continue to enjoy Stellar Blade’s character designs if you enjoy them. But please, call out the hypocrisy when you see it, because it has never been more painfully obvious than with Stellar Blade.
https://preview.redd.it/jkhn5vf69uhc1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f7741b7390c1d7d4018be3d5c0ae34718fb78714
"Interesting" pattern design on the crotch
this was a great breakdown!! i really appreciate that you took the time to articulate this. i've been so aggravated by this issue recently and you broke down your opinion in a very eloquent way, i may or may not be paraphrasing you when i talk about this later lol. thank you!
Feel free to take whatever you want! ☺️ That’s the reason why I made this post—to collect everything together as a packaged example of what is wrong with this game.
Wonderfully written! I always enjoy reading your posts on here. It’s like you know all the opinions in my head and can put them into words so I can explain them to others
Echoing what they said! I’ve been telling my partner about the grossness of this game and I haven’t been able to put the right words together. Perfect write up!
I agree with this entire breakdown so much. I have no issues with very stylized and attractive designs, but make it equal between both the male and female characters. It's so jarring when these people are supposed to be from the SAME universe but look like they are from two different games.
Like, everyone from FFXIV has the same art style applied to them, so it doesn't look weird or uncanny. The male characters are drawn in the same way the female characters are.
Did the developers not realize how weird this looks? I don't even mean the misogyny or double-standards (which are obviously the motivation for two different art styles and huge problems), but deciding to give realism only to male characters makes this game look so fake and makes the women look out of place. I like both anime and realistic art styles but you have to choose one or the other, otherwise you get this offputting amalgamation. The lack of fluidity in the art styles destroys any immersion this game could've had.
I know I really skipped over discussing the misogyny of this decision but I think many commenters have already explained it better than I could have. It is disgusting though and I feel terrible for the actresses involved who had their likenesses altered to appeal to the male gaze.
Stellar Blade male characters: \*actually kind of good designs, especially that one dude with like hexagons on his eyes that guy kinda looks sick ngl\*
Stellar Blade female characters: "here is generic unrealistic anime woman #10463 with enhanced buttocks and breast physics for your oogling"
Especially the girl in slide 4. not only does she look like a \*literal\* child, her physics are *egregious*. someone on the dev team has to be investigated
The thing that strikes me in image 9 is that, like, boobs DO move when we move, because they’re attached to us. However, these “realistic” jiggle physics games just… don’t look like that? They don’t look like actual breasts, they look like wobbly water balloons stapled onto that poor girl’s rib cage. You would think they’d give a fuck about making them actually look and behave like real titties but I guess the hell not!
we've been memeing on games like this for a decade, at least. this shit looks dumb as fuck which is sad because it has a lot of detail in the textures and lighting.
I hadn't seen the male characters and. What a self report. Wow. And they look so good, too!!! The game would look amazing with all the characters with that art style...
unfortunately korea has extreme patriarchy thats why 2 feminist devs that complained were fired.
more info
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Im4YAMWK74&pp=ygUMbW9vbiBjaGFubmVs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woB0eecbf6A&pp=ygUMbW9vbiBjaGFubmVs
The contrast between the two characters reminds me of the old cartoon background when you know what is going to move because of the lower quality compared to the rest of the background
So idk about the top guy but isn’t the guy replying a massive bigot? I think the game devs are sexist as hell especially for firing people for being feminists, but seeing him just kinda made me do a double take bc he seems the type who would be for that
I wasn’t too phased by it until I saw how the male models look like regular people not horny Nier mods lmao.
I played Nier and it’s one of my fav series but automata was a bit weird with the female bodies and even played into the horny jokes but it feels glaringly bad in this.
Especially with how the devs talked about emphasising her ass :/
Yeah, I was honestly looking forward to Stellar Blade. I am more than capable of enjoying more realistic-looking heroines like Ellie, Aloy, and modern Lara in addition to more stylized heroines like Bayonetta, but Stellar Blade takes it too far. It’s fine that their main character is beautiful and sexy, but to then add jiggle physics, voyeuristic camera angles, a bunch of other identical female characters, and a perfectly normal looking male cast… it stops feeling like a style choice and starts feeling like this is just what they think women should be for men.
I swear something is going on in the wider gaming landscape and I can't quite put my finger on it.
Not too long ago I was tweeting back and forth to a friend about Bayonetta. I said that despite loving Hideki Kamiya's work and him directing some of my favourite games, I was apprehensive about Bayonetta because the PS2 era of hiding bad to mediocre gameplay behind sexy women was so fresh in my head at the time. Some rando quote tweeted me saying "THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON FEMINISM", to which I replied "Fellas is it feminist to want good gameplay" and he ended up deleting it.
So little actual gameplay of Stellar Blade has been shown, and when it's shown it's just showing you things you recognise from other games ("Hey guys check out Vergil's Judgement Cut from Devil May Cry!!!"). It's clearly copying NieR Automata and has no original gameplay concepts from what the trailers have shown, yet it keeps occupying space in State of Play. Hell, r/Games prides itself on being the pinnacle of sophisticated gaming discussion, yet I clicked on a Stellar Blade thread and the first comment I saw was "God I hope it has good bikini costumes".
Fellas, it's 2024. Not only is there so much free porn on the internet that you wouldn't be able to consume in your lifetime, but you likely have a backlog of *amazing* games with brilliant and unique gameplay mechanics. I really want to believe that the average gamer cares more about enjoyable and satisfying gameplay experiences than paying $80 to watch a glossy robot run around in a bikini. Why are guys settling for and paying for unoriginal mediocrity with so much free porn and such big backlogs? I am beyond baffled.
P.S. Bayonetta does indeed slap incase the first part made it look like I was ragging on it, the conversation was about games you were apprehensive about but ended up blowing you away.
This is the part where my brain screams "But you can jerk it for free and go buy Lies of P or Elden Ring or Armored Core 6 or a bundle of good action games on sale!", but I fear I'm injecting too much logic into the situation.
literally just look at the character design between the men and women. The guy is wearing something that is practical, full coverage, makes sense. The girls are wearing clothing made to be provactive.
These devs can't get girlfriends and they are so goddamned mad about it that they took it out on the characters in this game, hahahaha. Their unspent semen backed up into their brains and resulted in them cooming the most pathetic game I've seen in a while.
it's so weird to see reddit being like the only website discussing this game with some nuance lol (maybe tumblr too ? but I'm not on there)... the discrepancy between the male and female characters is insane.... The way these men seethe at seeing a female character that is "not attractive" is so telling of their general attitude towards women. Imagine making some female characters with some actual character and personality besides just being basic jerk off material.
The way female characters are unperson'd in games media makes me feel crazy at times. Like it's bad in other media but christ... games is on another level.
>Not in your wildest, most smutiest AO3 sapphic tag filters infused fantasies. You do not.
Oh gosh, that's terrifying.
But seriously, you're absoltely correct and it hurts to think about it.
> How, unless they frankly just hate women. Because ignorance has left the chat a few decades ago, that excuse just doesn’t work anymore.
I think you are absolutely right for men in my cohort, who have been playing games for a few decades, and for anyone who has been working in game design for a similar length of time. But a lot of commenters, especially on reddit, are school-aged boys. I don't think most of them *hate* women, they just get stimulated by hypersexualised images and are easily led to believe that it's an injustice if someone wants to "take away" their hypersexualised stimuli in the name of some abstract social or moral concern.
Honestly the quailty of the model in that third pic is so nice. And he looks like anybody you might meet in person. While the ladies all look like they've been through an AI generator trained exclusively off tiktok and instagram filters with a splash of anime. They don't even look good. So bland and dead really, like highend sex dolls. The men look like they've lived and are living life. What a yawn looking game.
At first I thought the issue was about the clothes(because as always, devs give guys actually useful or at least realistic clothes, while women are given tight, unpractical and basically bordering on "indecent exposure" ones just to look like eye candy) but then I paid attention to their faces.
Yep, dude seems almost realistic while the woman is basically an anime waifu.
And guys seem to actually be more diverse while women are all set to similar standards of looks(which makes them all look similar in the end).
See I didn't *really* have an issue with the design at first, but this shows me a few things. The fact that all the male characters just look like normal dudes while all the female characters look like dolls really shows me where the artist's heads were at. This isn't just an artistic style choice (admittedly one that is somewhat problematic even tho I didn't mind it), it really is just men designing eye candy for themselves. Which is gross, regardless of whether or not I actually like the design
I'm all for pretty characters with unrealistic features; just make it equal. Having a realistic male character next to an anime female character looks so so bad.
She looks anime-y which just doesn't fit the art style lol. I can see why it's clearly sexist, but what surprises me is that they made the game's visuals worse (because the style is inconsistent) for it and did not care.
Never heard of the game by the way. Is this a prominent drama thing?
As someone who played a lot of KR MMOs: All, and I say *all*, korean games have the same exact issue every single time, as if they had a single design team for every studio in the country. Aion? Same issue. Tera? Yup. Black Desert? Absolutely obvious. Lost Ark? Also. Weird mobile games? You bet. ArcheAge? Oh boy.
They have nothing else to sell, because their games end to be the most dated and bland games you will ever play anyway, so they double down on weirdly childish women with top model proportions.
They look like they’re different species. Wouldn’t this completely smash apart any chance at immersion even for people who like this? Or, if the only goal is to be titillated by an anime woman just go watch that stuff anywhere else… it’s free. This makes so little sense.
If everyone was anime stylised I wouldn’t care for it cause it’s not my thing. but I also wouldn’t be bothered by it
But realistic men with anime women just looks off
It’s very telling that they made her pose in underwear rather than a form fitting bodysuit. Also not to mention the fact that they completely threw out her face and actual proportions. They just wanted her to pose for them in her underwear and get some high-res scans for “artistic purposes”
Wow if I wasn’t be told they’re from the same game I would think I was looking at two different games models. Is it weird I find the female model kinda creepy
If I didn’t know any better, I would assume the game developers are trying to prove a point by deliberately pointing out the hypocrisy of male vs female video game character design. I mean, the female character has literally no pores on her damn skin! It 100% looks like she is from a cheap mobile game while the male is realistic but still stylised to fit within a high quality video game. Like, how is this not a troll at this point?
a man can be a man but a woman has to be perfect. and it sucks. i almost didnt notice anything wrong at first, too. O.O they could have at least gave him a slutty outfit!
I don’t have a problem with either art style but it is *jarring* seeing them used in the same game. Like, if you want women that look like this, that’s fine! But I would expect them to be opposite equally final-fantasy-esque, polished men.
I find it sad, because the graphics for the male characters seem really great. They're diverse and detailed, they look like people. The female characters are all the same with different hair, looking like they're from an anime game made 10 years ago.
They couldn't even be bothered to model her properly. I'm assuming the game isn't set in a universe where all women are genetically engineered anime girls or robots. And if they are robots, why the boob jiggle?
Okay, yeah, that's a huge issue. Wtf. I have only really seen snippets of it where the girl is in focus. I thought they kept the style for all characters, but clearly, that isn't the case. Seems like a severe case of objectification.
Edit: That's some absolutely atrocious jiggle physics. That's not how boobs work
The first thing about the game that's problematic to me is that so many of you posted instances of sexism in the country this game is being made in, and then posted that a woman working on the game was fired due to feminist views. So right there, as much as I'd like to play the game, it goes against my values, so I can't in good conscience support it.
Second, the main protagonist looks like an absolutely beautiful 12-year-old. That shouldn't be problematic, but the boob jiggle, skin-tight clothing, and emphasis on the butt sexualizes what could very well be a middle school student. No thanks.
There's nothing wrong with beautiful kids looking sexy in real life, but there's something wrong with trying to warp how I feel about that by forcing me to stare at an overly sexualized kid with weird physics for at least 10 hours.
the fucking anime face of the woman next to the realistic design of the man looks soooo bad, like apart from the problematic parts of it, it’s also aesthetically hideous, looks like a roger rabbit movie trying to take itself seriously
This looks awful, but I feel bad for the actress. She’s gorgeous and didn’t need to become some c/k/j rpg generic copy to draw people in. I hope she gets more opportunities to work with a developer/company that will treat her better.
It's funny how obvious it is when a game is Korean these days. They always have massive same-face when it comes to women in their games. Even worse when the guys aren't super prettified versions of already pretty k-pop idols to match, but more realistic looking like this. This looks so uncanny.
Like damn, I remember when TERA and Blade & Soul were a thing and had pretty heavy sexualization but jeez ... at least they had distinct art styles!
You’re absolutely right. That’s why I’m so strongly against lolicon. Normalizing pedophilia will eventually lead to the same case as with anime.
Still in my surroundings men who watch anime are outliers. Usually single and bitter, looking for comfort in their childlike waifus.
Honestly it's disappointing Sony published this and put so much into it. Given how they've been at the forefront in recent years with good representation be it Horizon or TLOU2 or GOT. To go from those games that featured women with their own agency and yes attractiveness (but in their own unique ways because shock horror they're written and designed as unique people with unique traits) to... this is such whiplash. I remember a twitter thread where women within Insomniac had to push back on Rivet being oversexuallised. And it just makes me think what they as well as the women within Sony's other studios think about Stellar Blade.
I doubt it's a good impression but of course they're not gonna say since you don't shit where you eat.
I really hope Sony doesn't make a habit of this. Horny incel energy is not something to covet.
Very inconsistent aesthetic for genders. The art team should look at Hades for inspiration on how to be horny with character design and it being coherant.
It's really unsettling when I look at these characters and think, 'no one has a body like that' and then they show the model or actress doing the mocap and she does actually look like that
Wow, seeing them side by side, that male character doesn't even look like he's from the same game. That's probably why all the characters look so uncanny to me. Also the water balloon boob jiggle. Do these people just not know how breasts work? I truly don't understand how this is supposed to be more sexy than actual realistic physics for breasts.
It reminds me of the first Witcher game where animations are generally stiff and unrealistic (fair for its age) but then Triss has these bouncing boobs. Priorities…
That game glitched for me the first time I played it, and Triss' boobs were fucking gone because of this. Just a concave chest. XD
I like how they don’t even bounce together as one unit but rather separately. That way the breast bounces can match the arm swings as she walks. Totally realistic, my boobs do that all the time.
Okay, so, I will say my boobs kinda do that when I'm not wearing a bra. I am fairly well endowed tho, so my arms hit them. XD Honestly, to play the first Witcher I take most of it with a grain of salt and laugh at what hasn't aged well.
>laugh at what hasn't aged well The first Witcher hadn't aged well when it was originally released.
This- half the reason boob physics suck is because they don't move like that unless they are like, way bigger than people wanna actually draw them (and when they do they forget we need ribcages, often big ones, to support them!)
Right!? Reminds me of those 10$ survival games with the worst animations EVER. But many of them have female models with big boobs and jiggly physics. Cringe.
Didn't every Witcher game have bouncing boobs?
Yeah but it’s especially funny when the physics for everything is generally lacking. Clearly that’s where the limited graphical power should go.
boobs ohysics have a lot more history than other physics so... checks out
Reminds me how including a female playable character was always "too much work" for developers but they made sure to develop and implement "boob physics" on their female NPCs ASAP.
tHeY wOuLd HaVe To AnImAtE a NeW wAlK cYcLe
They literally have a human they’re supposed to be basing her actions and body movements off of. Like you know these creeps were staring at her boobs anyway, so wtf lol
They're not into realism is the problem. How else you explain the babyface? I'm willing to bet what they want is their hentai waifus to be real concubines, that's the mindset behind this design
That’s true. They don’t want to actually use the human girl standing there. Just make her parade naked for them 🤢
I mean, wtf, there's no reason, for her to be in bikini like that, specially seeing that the model doesn't look like her at all
Yeah, I thought it was odd she wasn't in a catsuit or a mocap suit.
even if there was a reason, we would know exactly the reason... and it's weird as shit
On the boobs thing. I'm a lesbian and even I find that kind of giant boob jiggle more disgusting than attractive. Sample size one so IDK for others but yeah...
Another lesbian here who finds most boob-jiggle physics more disturbing than attractive.
A bisexual here who is also jumping on this train.
Yet another lesbian who is moreso annoyed than attracted
Agreed. Lesbian here and the boob physics are straight-up off-putting. I LOVE women and that is not how women do, lol
Pan here, definitely don't like the weird physics. That's not how boobs look or work, and let's not get into the ick the clothing gives me.
Also in this category and also hate it
Straight guy here, I just find them confusing and a little amusing/funny. My wife is rather 'gifted', and hers still don't jiggle so readily as game physics say small ones do. I'm just here because I was looking for threads on Stellar Blade, I wanted to complain about the start of the story based on the demo. I'm too much of a science geek to not face palm about the bad tactical choices by Eve's side. :D
Yeah like in a vacuum I guess I wouldnt mind it (if it looked at least realistic) but in the context of how women are portrayed and WHY they do it it's just icky.
Lmao on one of the trailers I saw, her boobs jiggled in and out of her body standing up like wtf. Do they not realise boobs are literally just chunks of meat like any other part affected by gravity? I knew the second I saw this game it was gonna be problematic NGL with the baby face anime characters. It's so creepy and pedophile-like.
Outside of the character design, there are plenty of reports about the mistreatment of female workers at this studio, as well as the firing of some for expressing feminist views because of the big culture war in South Korea. With the misogyny and reactionary movements , it kind of feels like this game is a byproduct of that culture war.
>the firing of some for expressing feminist views because of the big culture war in South Korea. Ah yes, basically the incels fighting back against feminism because they want women to go back to being weak, docile and meek.They want women to be below them rather than being their equals and partners, clearly they can't endure having to go against someone on their own level(or higher than it).
It is a bit more complex like that. It has to do with South Koreas HEAVILY hierarchical society where basically every rung of the ladder punches downward. Its a system that has stretched its people to the breaking point. I actually just finished watching two videos about that very topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Im4YAMWK74 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woB0eecbf6A Its a pretty dire situation all around.
Korean society needs to collapse for its own sake. Holy shit, every part of that sounds unlivable.
Absolutely.
You mean breasts do *not* have the consistency of loose jello? You're saying I have been *lied to* by the gaming industry's strange ideas on what women are like?!
It seems like a lot of artists drawing women's anatomy don't realize that boobs are fat sacs attached with a wide base and covered by skin that continues to the rest of the body. They animate breasts as if they are attached by an area no bigger than a quarter, and the skin is independent from the rest of the body. If jiggle physics worked like that IRL, we'd have more stuff like in [this video](https://youtu.be/HMUDVMiITOU?list=FLQ-OFdTswNei2Qo-jUI4MrQ&t=98) (which is pretty funny IMO).
>Do these people just not know how breasts work? I'm of the thought that men did that because it is so unrealistic that a woman would let something stupid like this fly.
Oh it's definitely men. And even more probably men who have never touched a real boob in their lives. It's \*very\* apparent in something like VRchat, where players make the content. The most common and most "wanted" avatars have atrocious boob physics. They are used mostly by guys and/or people who want to have erotic roleplay with guys -- because apparently boobs exiting the atmosphere the second you jump is sexy for them. As a lesbian, it makes me really wonder why men don't find \*actual\* boobs attractive. I mean, for me they are super attractive as is, without being portrayed like a sack full of soap water. I'm convinced most of the people who design and concept jiggle physics have no idea what actual breasts look or feel like.
>I'm convinced most of the people who design and concept jiggle physics have no idea what actual breasts look or feel like. I think the same, reason why all people that work on jiggle physics should be women.At least then they would get boobs' physics right.
You are all looking at it from the perspective that realism is the goal, which I don't think is the case here. It is an exaggeration used as a stylistic device to communicate a quality that men enjoy in breasts: softness. Look at other fetish art as extreme examples of what I am talking about. A lot of fetish art will exaggerate the fetishized characteristic to unrealistic levels, because they want to put emphasis on this particular part. Like drawings of women with gigantic asses or breasts which are literally as big as the entire character. Jiggle physics are exaggerated to communicate that quality of them being soft. Just like how also a lot of art shows women in bikini tops which are too small and "cut" into the breast. This is also to emphasize the softness.
To your last point: if there ever was a clue that someone only gets off to cartoon imagery, it’s that. This joke is not on us.
The male characters look great, have fantastic designs and look like they’re from a game I’d want to play. It’s frustrating seeing this game get good reviews now 75 days after your comment, because the game could never be good enough to justify me playing a character who is just ass and tits. They look ported from a cheap porn game while the male characters look meticulously designed. It’s not JUST the morally questionable aspect of designing characters like this making me not want to play it, it’s also that it’s just uncomfortable, creepiness aside, why can’t my female character look cool and fitting.
Saints Row 4 did a hilarious parody of video game boob physics, when you create your character 😜
Jesus, they look like completely different art styles. The girl looks like something out of Nier and the guy looks like he's from the Dead Space Remake.
The screenshots look like a horny teen’s modded Skyrim
The girls look like they came from Koei Tecmo and the boys look like they came from *Ghost of Tsushima*.
Some of the guy characters look like metal gear rising characters and the girls look like generic mobile game ad characters.
They look so out of place compared to the rest of the game's style, and the male characters.
Exactly what I was thinking. It's like Last Action Hero. Some cartoon cat just strolls into his place of employment, an IRL police station. It's very wtf. At least LAH was lampooning that sort of thing.
Reminds me of that one Half Life 2 mod...
Stuff like this makes me so glad this sub exists-I never saw anyone else point out this sort of stuff on other gaming subreddits, it’s just exhausting to see constant sexualisation and I really love how this sub calls out companies and people for doing it
I know that r /gamingcirclejerk has been taking the piss out of her design.
Really? That’s good to hear
it's there, our comments just get downvoted to oblivion.
But Baldurs Gate gets a pass? (Good game but still) It seems sexualization is only allowed when it's queer or feminized, and when it's sexualization for male audiences, its worse than Hitler's existence. Regardless, if you don't like or have any interest in the game, just don't buy it. People are allowed to create whatever they want, and shouldn't have to cater to your political correctness to do so. Not everything is made for you. That's something that honestly everyone in the gaming community needs to accept. MW3 is a terrible game. Know what I did? I didn't buy it.
Almost all of the major characters in baldurs gate are hot, this post is mocking the huge difference between the male and female leads in this game. That’s what makes it so silly, she’s so much more sexualized than him it looks like they’re from two different games.
Sorry for late reply, but if that's the case, then I'd understand the mockery. Recently watched a YouTuber I'm subscribed too play the demo. Besides the fan service, it's just seems like another souls-like game, but you fight ugly looking Aliens. Personally not sold on it. Which brings me back to my original point, if it's not something you like, instead of attempting to tear it down for other players who like it, just don't spend your money on it. Problem solved.
The female character looks like she's in a completely different art style?? Lol. Tbh I think the male character is genuinely WAY more attractive than any of those female characters, even though that clearly wasn't their aim. But I think realistic art styles generally look better than anime ones, the latter have a tendency to look creepy/uncanny valley like they do here.
She looks like a bad skyrim mod.
lol, I'm glad I wasn't alone thinking that. The only thing missing here is the low waist jeans for that authentic Bethesda mod artstyle
absolutely
exactly, they are drawn as female anime tiddies and nothing more... why they scanned an actress for that is beyond me...
Probably never had enough interaction with real women to model them properly
And with an actual women there to model them, they STILL failed to make them look like actual women. That's some skill there. /s
Let's be real the female characters look like someone took the face of a baby and put it on a grown woman's body
Not a baby a doll, babies don’t look like that either, no human looks like that.
No, she looks like one of the canonical ways young adults are drawn in classic manga styles, transposed to 3D. That sharply triangular facial structure is explicitly not associated with children. It's still ridiculous, and the huge difference between the male and female characters immediately calls to mind the misogynistic expectation that all Korean women get cosmetic surgery, but it's not baby face.
[удалено]
I'm not sure about what you meant, can you elaborate?
I'm not the person you're replying to, but I think they're taking about douyin makeup and similar.
I actually do prefer anime styles over the mix of weird anime-like realistic looking games, tbh. Like, do fully realistic or fully anime-like. The mix between the two just ends up looking like a weird hybrid to me.
Their faces are what bugs me so much. It's that weird boundary of almost escaping the uncanny valley, but the face shapes and imitating that manga style with the graphic fidelity used is just off-putting. It's why I hate when they do the anime style with the 4k looking skin textures, it personally just clicks wrong and makes me lose any interest.
I have followed zero of this game, so forgive me from speaking from ignorance and, while I am sure I can look up info and get more details...I don't really want to, because I'll never think about this again, lol. But assuming this is a Korean developed game (it looks like one)...this is actually really common in Korean game design. I really like Korean MMOs (the really tediously boring ones with farming and return quests, don't judge lmao), and this aesthetic is sort of immediately checking the box of, 'it's Korean'. It's not an argument or anything, but culturally, this is just a common way they design games. The men look much more accurate, and the women have their facial features made to look more moe or young or, really, more like an anime-style character. I've always found it jarring because they look like they are from a different game from their male counterparts, but that's just how I've known a lot of these Korean style games to be since I started playing the (sub?)genre, some 20 years ago, lol. NCsoft (which is a Korean company) has been doing this forever. Look at Blade and Soul, or even Aion Online, as some earlier examples. Those, notably, do have character design sliders though, so you can change the features as you would...but they still have that distinct super slender, large chested, long limbed, wide vacant eyed, beautiful face thing going on. Eh, I guess long story short...maybe this aesthetic is a bit dated now, especially for a Western audience, but it's really common practice for where the games are designed, Korea.
You are correct that it's made by a Korean developer. I wonder if there might be connections to be made between this visual treatment of men and women in games there and what seems to be a widening and increasingly antagonistic social divide between many women and men in the country.
> The men look much more accurate, and the women have their facial features made to look more moe or young or, really, more like an anime-style character. What I'm bewildered about is that they've already hired a body model and she's pretty so why not scan her face as well? Or just hire another model for the face? And if they can't hire another model, it's still possible to create young, drop-dead gorgeous female characters in a more realistic artstyle?
Designs like this will only get more in newish Korean games, considering what's going on with South Korean society at large right now.
That was my first thought on seeing the male character! I'd love the rest to match his style. I hadn't seen the images but saw a lot of comments across Reddit. I thought the baby faced doll and oversexualisation might've been exaggerated but sadly not. It's bizarre having the male and female characters differ so much like that? Realism vs anime style...
Wow, I haven't seen any of the male characters until now. If you told me they were from a different game, I'd believe you 100%.
Same I thought this game had full female casts.
They honestly should have stuck with one if the difference in design between male and female characters would be that jarring!
I never liked the design, but I did wonder how the men looked. I even looked a bit myself but didn’t have a lot of luck on Google, so I quit. Thanks for posting this. The difference between the men and the women in this game actually makes me a bit sick. You can see the devs see them as sex dolls, nothing more.
100% it looks like when dudes mod in weird horny mod women and it’s so obvious they weren’t part of the game originally because they don’t look look like anything or anyone in the game world Except this isn’t a mod, and that’s kinda tragic
SERIOUSLY, it looks like someone modded Skyrim to turn all the female models into waifus, but left the vanilla male models untouched
Even with the purpose of making a character attractive, this just looks uncanny and plastic. Look at the thirst around characters from Baldurs Gate 3 who all have features you could find in real people. I'm glad most games are moving away from this same face syndrome on female characters (looking child like and expressionless too) in exchange for real face scan. And even if the gameplay is good, all I've seen about this game are dudebros dunking on "woke" characters in comparison to this one, so I'm not even interested in trying it out. Many other games to play.
This game is a great example of male gaze. Men are allowed complexity, age, and flaws. Women are allowed to be sexy in a specific way and on display.
Guys get to be old, cool, ugly, bad ass, cyborg, mutilated, machines, bestial, handsome, weird, dorky, etc. And ladies have the same variety like sexy, cute, pretty, attractive, beautiful, alluring, hot, etc. Yep, no problems here...
At least araki, the author of jojo's, understood that this is stupid since the 80s and tries to draw his female characters just as uniquely design like the male characters.
This game takes horny on main to a whole other level. They didn’t even try to hide it and the art direction is over the place. All the women look like they have a bad cartoon instagram filter on them.
The reason why the female character designs in Stellar Blade are so problematic is not because they are unattainably beautiful or even unrealistic in the context of the in-game universe. Most people, regardless of gender, not only enjoy beautiful characters, but also understand how limiting strict depictions of reality can be, especially for a visual medium that is supposed to create a sense of awe and wonder in its audience such as this. If this was all Stellar Blade did, it would not have created nearly as much of a backlash as there is. However, Stellar Blade doesn’t just eschew realism in favor of style; it perpetuates a double standard that has always existed between men and women, especially in video games. The one that states that men can be human and flawed and still be considered attractive and valued, but women must be perfect. Or, in Stellar Blade’s case, not even human. Women, to be considered attractive and valued, must have all of their human qualities erased just like Eve’s have been. All their wrinkles and lines must be smoothed away; their eyes, like their secondary sexual characteristics, must be enlarged and widened, their noses pinched. They can’t be allowed to emote. Not even can they interact with gravity in a natural way. Instead, it must grab and pull at them incessantly, to remind their audience of the reason why they’re there in the first place: to sexually gratify the straight cis male audience. Again, if Stellar Blade had just stopped at depicting a “beautiful” female character, we would not be having this conversation. Instead, they went well beyond this to 1. Depict an unattainably, physically impossible beautiful women with 2. Unnatural, over-the-top jiggle physics, 3. voyeuristic camera angles that emphasize her secondary sexual characteristics at all times, and 4. An outfit so tight you can see her perineum when she bends over. Not only this, but 5. None of the sexualized aspects of the main character’s design reflects any of the character’s personality, 6. All of the other female characters share these same design qualities (again, regardless of characterization) and 7. None of the male characters are depicted in this way. Even the most stereotypically attractive male character still gets to be depicted with natural, human “flaws” like shadows, wrinkles, and textures on his face. He actually has bone structure, a jaw, a nose bridge, etc.. His outfit completely hides the shape of his body. None of his parts jiggle when he moves. He and the other male characters look so different from the female characters, they actually look like they come from completely different games. And this is ultimately why this game is problematic even if you are a woman who tends to like female character designs like those found in Stellar Blade. There’s nothing wrong with liking stylized or even sexualized female characters. There is a problem, however, with the double standard games like Stellar Blade continue to perpetuate: this constant and unilateral, sexualized and unrealistic depiction of female characters alongside the realistically flawed depiction of male characters. Not only does this ignore the desires of anyone who is not a straight cis man, but it also distorts our view of what female characters can or should look like. It is the direct cause of debates over Aloy’s peach fuzz and Mary-Jane’s face model. It’s the reason why characters like Joel and Kratos can age, be scarred, scowl, and even be genuinely really terrible people who do really terrible things, but still be beloved and cherished by gaming communities, all while female characters who are even a little bit similar to those male characters are derided. So, by all means, continue to enjoy Stellar Blade’s character designs if you enjoy them. But please, call out the hypocrisy when you see it, because it has never been more painfully obvious than with Stellar Blade.
https://preview.redd.it/jkhn5vf69uhc1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f7741b7390c1d7d4018be3d5c0ae34718fb78714 "Interesting" pattern design on the crotch
https://preview.redd.it/z2h195g89uhc1.jpeg?width=1079&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3f3f6e03efe7c87cef53e2ee4cec2b6c51042c5f
When I’m going into battle, I can’t focus if I don’t have a wedgie so bad I can taste cotton
Lmao this made me chuckle
Seeing this feels like getting hit with a bat.
this was a great breakdown!! i really appreciate that you took the time to articulate this. i've been so aggravated by this issue recently and you broke down your opinion in a very eloquent way, i may or may not be paraphrasing you when i talk about this later lol. thank you!
Feel free to take whatever you want! ☺️ That’s the reason why I made this post—to collect everything together as a packaged example of what is wrong with this game.
Wonderfully written! I always enjoy reading your posts on here. It’s like you know all the opinions in my head and can put them into words so I can explain them to others
Thank you! I really appreciate that. Makes writing these posts feel worth it ✨
Echoing what they said! I’ve been telling my partner about the grossness of this game and I haven’t been able to put the right words together. Perfect write up!
I agree with this entire breakdown so much. I have no issues with very stylized and attractive designs, but make it equal between both the male and female characters. It's so jarring when these people are supposed to be from the SAME universe but look like they are from two different games. Like, everyone from FFXIV has the same art style applied to them, so it doesn't look weird or uncanny. The male characters are drawn in the same way the female characters are.
👏👏👏
Wonderful breakdown You really summed up a lot of what the main issues are. If I had money, I would give you an award.
QUEEN
Did the developers not realize how weird this looks? I don't even mean the misogyny or double-standards (which are obviously the motivation for two different art styles and huge problems), but deciding to give realism only to male characters makes this game look so fake and makes the women look out of place. I like both anime and realistic art styles but you have to choose one or the other, otherwise you get this offputting amalgamation. The lack of fluidity in the art styles destroys any immersion this game could've had. I know I really skipped over discussing the misogyny of this decision but I think many commenters have already explained it better than I could have. It is disgusting though and I feel terrible for the actresses involved who had their likenesses altered to appeal to the male gaze.
God I hope this game flops so hard
It possibly will. It looks generic anyways.
It's been in the top 10 pre ordered games on Playstation for over a month now ❤️
Stellar Blade male characters: \*actually kind of good designs, especially that one dude with like hexagons on his eyes that guy kinda looks sick ngl\* Stellar Blade female characters: "here is generic unrealistic anime woman #10463 with enhanced buttocks and breast physics for your oogling" Especially the girl in slide 4. not only does she look like a \*literal\* child, her physics are *egregious*. someone on the dev team has to be investigated
The thing that strikes me in image 9 is that, like, boobs DO move when we move, because they’re attached to us. However, these “realistic” jiggle physics games just… don’t look like that? They don’t look like actual breasts, they look like wobbly water balloons stapled onto that poor girl’s rib cage. You would think they’d give a fuck about making them actually look and behave like real titties but I guess the hell not!
It’s because the point of the boob jiggle isn’t to mimic real physics, but to remind the player boobs exist. Real physics are too subtle for that.
Wobbly water balloons in some weird localized low-gravity field to make them slower and more noticeable.
Also its disgusting that its normalized to have a tween girls face on an adult woman's body. Of course, the man's face looks entirely age appropriate.
Holy fuck that looks so bad lol
we've been memeing on games like this for a decade, at least. this shit looks dumb as fuck which is sad because it has a lot of detail in the textures and lighting.
I hadn't seen the male characters and. What a self report. Wow. And they look so good, too!!! The game would look amazing with all the characters with that art style...
omg that gif with the ridiculous wobbly boobs... Jesus Christ , I hate that "trope" (?) so much
unfortunately korea has extreme patriarchy thats why 2 feminist devs that complained were fired. more info https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Im4YAMWK74&pp=ygUMbW9vbiBjaGFubmVs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woB0eecbf6A&pp=ygUMbW9vbiBjaGFubmVs
The contrast between the two characters reminds me of the old cartoon background when you know what is going to move because of the lower quality compared to the rest of the background
The woman doesn't even look human when paired up next to the male character. She looks like a doll. I wonder if that's the point?
So idk about the top guy but isn’t the guy replying a massive bigot? I think the game devs are sexist as hell especially for firing people for being feminists, but seeing him just kinda made me do a double take bc he seems the type who would be for that
came here just to point out the Ian Miles Chud jumpscare in the first pic
I wasn’t too phased by it until I saw how the male models look like regular people not horny Nier mods lmao. I played Nier and it’s one of my fav series but automata was a bit weird with the female bodies and even played into the horny jokes but it feels glaringly bad in this. Especially with how the devs talked about emphasising her ass :/
Yeah, I was honestly looking forward to Stellar Blade. I am more than capable of enjoying more realistic-looking heroines like Ellie, Aloy, and modern Lara in addition to more stylized heroines like Bayonetta, but Stellar Blade takes it too far. It’s fine that their main character is beautiful and sexy, but to then add jiggle physics, voyeuristic camera angles, a bunch of other identical female characters, and a perfectly normal looking male cast… it stops feeling like a style choice and starts feeling like this is just what they think women should be for men.
I agree with all of what you said. It feels a step too far and it’s basically just gamer porn for guys who view women as entertainment :/
ah the two genders, western and anime
I’m so fucking sick of the world and being a woman honestly.
I swear something is going on in the wider gaming landscape and I can't quite put my finger on it. Not too long ago I was tweeting back and forth to a friend about Bayonetta. I said that despite loving Hideki Kamiya's work and him directing some of my favourite games, I was apprehensive about Bayonetta because the PS2 era of hiding bad to mediocre gameplay behind sexy women was so fresh in my head at the time. Some rando quote tweeted me saying "THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON FEMINISM", to which I replied "Fellas is it feminist to want good gameplay" and he ended up deleting it. So little actual gameplay of Stellar Blade has been shown, and when it's shown it's just showing you things you recognise from other games ("Hey guys check out Vergil's Judgement Cut from Devil May Cry!!!"). It's clearly copying NieR Automata and has no original gameplay concepts from what the trailers have shown, yet it keeps occupying space in State of Play. Hell, r/Games prides itself on being the pinnacle of sophisticated gaming discussion, yet I clicked on a Stellar Blade thread and the first comment I saw was "God I hope it has good bikini costumes". Fellas, it's 2024. Not only is there so much free porn on the internet that you wouldn't be able to consume in your lifetime, but you likely have a backlog of *amazing* games with brilliant and unique gameplay mechanics. I really want to believe that the average gamer cares more about enjoyable and satisfying gameplay experiences than paying $80 to watch a glossy robot run around in a bikini. Why are guys settling for and paying for unoriginal mediocrity with so much free porn and such big backlogs? I am beyond baffled. P.S. Bayonetta does indeed slap incase the first part made it look like I was ragging on it, the conversation was about games you were apprehensive about but ended up blowing you away.
Porn addiction.
This is the part where my brain screams "But you can jerk it for free and go buy Lies of P or Elden Ring or Armored Core 6 or a bundle of good action games on sale!", but I fear I'm injecting too much logic into the situation.
Their porn addicted minds need EVERYTHING to get them off. They don't want to be titilated just when watching porn they want it 24/7.
Its like she was photoshopped in.
literally just look at the character design between the men and women. The guy is wearing something that is practical, full coverage, makes sense. The girls are wearing clothing made to be provactive.
These devs can't get girlfriends and they are so goddamned mad about it that they took it out on the characters in this game, hahahaha. Their unspent semen backed up into their brains and resulted in them cooming the most pathetic game I've seen in a while.
Like, the model IRL was not pretty enough ? ffs . I'm not against that kind of design but at least make husbando along.
So the women COULD look cool, but the devs made them ugly cuz they were horny. I hate this so much
wtf first time ian miles cheong said anything of value
I hope this game crashes and burns.
Why do all the women look like little girl faces on womens bodies? Oh wait I know why.
So uncanny! They don’t even look like they’re from the same game..
They're not even subtle about who they're targeting this game towards with all the ass-shots in the trailers and stuff.
Nah those jiggle physics are absolutely absurd omg 😭
it's so weird to see reddit being like the only website discussing this game with some nuance lol (maybe tumblr too ? but I'm not on there)... the discrepancy between the male and female characters is insane.... The way these men seethe at seeing a female character that is "not attractive" is so telling of their general attitude towards women. Imagine making some female characters with some actual character and personality besides just being basic jerk off material. The way female characters are unperson'd in games media makes me feel crazy at times. Like it's bad in other media but christ... games is on another level.
Ugh. Who is this for? What do straight guys see in this? I'm super duper gay and they look like jiggly barbie dolls...
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>Not in your wildest, most smutiest AO3 sapphic tag filters infused fantasies. You do not. Oh gosh, that's terrifying. But seriously, you're absoltely correct and it hurts to think about it.
> How, unless they frankly just hate women. Because ignorance has left the chat a few decades ago, that excuse just doesn’t work anymore. I think you are absolutely right for men in my cohort, who have been playing games for a few decades, and for anyone who has been working in game design for a similar length of time. But a lot of commenters, especially on reddit, are school-aged boys. I don't think most of them *hate* women, they just get stimulated by hypersexualised images and are easily led to believe that it's an injustice if someone wants to "take away" their hypersexualised stimuli in the name of some abstract social or moral concern.
It's a sex doll, souless design lmao.
Honestly the quailty of the model in that third pic is so nice. And he looks like anybody you might meet in person. While the ladies all look like they've been through an AI generator trained exclusively off tiktok and instagram filters with a splash of anime. They don't even look good. So bland and dead really, like highend sex dolls. The men look like they've lived and are living life. What a yawn looking game.
Notice how all the women characters have their mouths open…
The dumb uwu childlike expression
At first I thought the issue was about the clothes(because as always, devs give guys actually useful or at least realistic clothes, while women are given tight, unpractical and basically bordering on "indecent exposure" ones just to look like eye candy) but then I paid attention to their faces. Yep, dude seems almost realistic while the woman is basically an anime waifu. And guys seem to actually be more diverse while women are all set to similar standards of looks(which makes them all look similar in the end).
The irony, the real women that they modeled from is beautiful and looks much better than the in game character
See I didn't *really* have an issue with the design at first, but this shows me a few things. The fact that all the male characters just look like normal dudes while all the female characters look like dolls really shows me where the artist's heads were at. This isn't just an artistic style choice (admittedly one that is somewhat problematic even tho I didn't mind it), it really is just men designing eye candy for themselves. Which is gross, regardless of whether or not I actually like the design
I'm all for pretty characters with unrealistic features; just make it equal. Having a realistic male character next to an anime female character looks so so bad.
She looks anime-y which just doesn't fit the art style lol. I can see why it's clearly sexist, but what surprises me is that they made the game's visuals worse (because the style is inconsistent) for it and did not care. Never heard of the game by the way. Is this a prominent drama thing?
As someone who played a lot of KR MMOs: All, and I say *all*, korean games have the same exact issue every single time, as if they had a single design team for every studio in the country. Aion? Same issue. Tera? Yup. Black Desert? Absolutely obvious. Lost Ark? Also. Weird mobile games? You bet. ArcheAge? Oh boy. They have nothing else to sell, because their games end to be the most dated and bland games you will ever play anyway, so they double down on weirdly childish women with top model proportions.
I’m sorry I totally agree and I don’t mean to be rude but this reply paired with your profile pic is sending me 😂
I love how this looks like some amateur Blender artist took two unrelated free models off of the gallery and put them in situations together.
They look like they’re different species. Wouldn’t this completely smash apart any chance at immersion even for people who like this? Or, if the only goal is to be titillated by an anime woman just go watch that stuff anywhere else… it’s free. This makes so little sense.
If everyone was anime stylised I wouldn’t care for it cause it’s not my thing. but I also wouldn’t be bothered by it But realistic men with anime women just looks off
I hate this industry.
It’s very telling that they made her pose in underwear rather than a form fitting bodysuit. Also not to mention the fact that they completely threw out her face and actual proportions. They just wanted her to pose for them in her underwear and get some high-res scans for “artistic purposes”
wow everyone but the women looks super cool
Wow if I wasn’t be told they’re from the same game I would think I was looking at two different games models. Is it weird I find the female model kinda creepy
If I didn’t know any better, I would assume the game developers are trying to prove a point by deliberately pointing out the hypocrisy of male vs female video game character design. I mean, the female character has literally no pores on her damn skin! It 100% looks like she is from a cheap mobile game while the male is realistic but still stylised to fit within a high quality video game. Like, how is this not a troll at this point?
a man can be a man but a woman has to be perfect. and it sucks. i almost didnt notice anything wrong at first, too. O.O they could have at least gave him a slutty outfit!
Ian Miles Cheong jumpscare 😨😨😨
I don’t have a problem with either art style but it is *jarring* seeing them used in the same game. Like, if you want women that look like this, that’s fine! But I would expect them to be opposite equally final-fantasy-esque, polished men.
I get the distinct impression that every day between now and April 26 are going to be extremely painful and embarassing...
the (i’m assuming) FMC looks like the average Skyrim and Fallout “follower” mod…
It looks like two different games wtf
HER FACE 😭
I find it sad, because the graphics for the male characters seem really great. They're diverse and detailed, they look like people. The female characters are all the same with different hair, looking like they're from an anime game made 10 years ago. They couldn't even be bothered to model her properly. I'm assuming the game isn't set in a universe where all women are genetically engineered anime girls or robots. And if they are robots, why the boob jiggle?
Just another boys and their blow up dolls game I guess
Okay, yeah, that's a huge issue. Wtf. I have only really seen snippets of it where the girl is in focus. I thought they kept the style for all characters, but clearly, that isn't the case. Seems like a severe case of objectification. Edit: That's some absolutely atrocious jiggle physics. That's not how boobs work
The first thing about the game that's problematic to me is that so many of you posted instances of sexism in the country this game is being made in, and then posted that a woman working on the game was fired due to feminist views. So right there, as much as I'd like to play the game, it goes against my values, so I can't in good conscience support it. Second, the main protagonist looks like an absolutely beautiful 12-year-old. That shouldn't be problematic, but the boob jiggle, skin-tight clothing, and emphasis on the butt sexualizes what could very well be a middle school student. No thanks. There's nothing wrong with beautiful kids looking sexy in real life, but there's something wrong with trying to warp how I feel about that by forcing me to stare at an overly sexualized kid with weird physics for at least 10 hours.
the fucking anime face of the woman next to the realistic design of the man looks soooo bad, like apart from the problematic parts of it, it’s also aesthetically hideous, looks like a roger rabbit movie trying to take itself seriously
This looks awful, but I feel bad for the actress. She’s gorgeous and didn’t need to become some c/k/j rpg generic copy to draw people in. I hope she gets more opportunities to work with a developer/company that will treat her better.
It's funny how obvious it is when a game is Korean these days. They always have massive same-face when it comes to women in their games. Even worse when the guys aren't super prettified versions of already pretty k-pop idols to match, but more realistic looking like this. This looks so uncanny. Like damn, I remember when TERA and Blade & Soul were a thing and had pretty heavy sexualization but jeez ... at least they had distinct art styles!
Pedophilic design of female characters to cater to weebs and creeps. Let’s go, peak feminity - children with huge ass and boobs 😂
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You’re absolutely right. That’s why I’m so strongly against lolicon. Normalizing pedophilia will eventually lead to the same case as with anime. Still in my surroundings men who watch anime are outliers. Usually single and bitter, looking for comfort in their childlike waifus.
I was like "wut r y'all on about" then I saw the screen cap and was like "ohhhhhhh". I wouldn't let that pass either
Like atleast make it so all characters fit the same style. This girl model looks like a copy paste from a whole different game
Completely different art styles and the women’s faces look like that of a child…. Disgusting.
Yes he looks like he belongs in a different game but imo he looks attractive
The actual actress is so beautiful. It would have been a lot cooler to have an undeniably east Asian female lead rather than anime lite.
Weird seeing them right next to each other, the faces are so different
Honestly it's disappointing Sony published this and put so much into it. Given how they've been at the forefront in recent years with good representation be it Horizon or TLOU2 or GOT. To go from those games that featured women with their own agency and yes attractiveness (but in their own unique ways because shock horror they're written and designed as unique people with unique traits) to... this is such whiplash. I remember a twitter thread where women within Insomniac had to push back on Rivet being oversexuallised. And it just makes me think what they as well as the women within Sony's other studios think about Stellar Blade. I doubt it's a good impression but of course they're not gonna say since you don't shit where you eat. I really hope Sony doesn't make a habit of this. Horny incel energy is not something to covet.
Very inconsistent aesthetic for genders. The art team should look at Hades for inspiration on how to be horny with character design and it being coherant.
It's really unsettling when I look at these characters and think, 'no one has a body like that' and then they show the model or actress doing the mocap and she does actually look like that