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+--- Thread: Another Japanese game, another terrible excuse for not having a playable female char. (/showthread.php?tid=7034)
Another Japanese game, another terrible excuse for not having a playable female char. - A Black Falcon - 6th April 2017
No, not the one about how BotW doesn't have a playable female character because "if Zelda was the protagonist then what would Link do?", or how The Last Guardian or Shadow of the Colossus don't have one because women don't have strong grip strength, etc. There are a lot of Western games with only male protagonists too, but probably because Japan is more sexist than the West, their excuses for why games don't have them often are way worse; here it's usually stuff like "because marketing says male characters sell better".
So anyway, what is it this time?
https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/precious-moments-hype-and-high-school-a-conversation-with-persona-5-director-katsura-hashino
It's Persona 5... and Persona 4 as well. So why don't Personas 4 and 5 have female protagonist options, after Persona 3 Portable added a female character, and her campaign was pretty good and is considered by some as the better of the two? Well, they give two reasons, one understandable and the other as bad as the worst of my first paragraph:
First, that it'd have cost a lot more to do two protagonists -- this is a writing-heavy series with a relationship component, so yes, that is true, you would need a lot more script, two versions of many scenes, etc. They could have done it though, as they have before and many Western dialog-heavy games do have gender-choice options.
And second...
Quote:With the way that game's world worked, it was okay for the protagonist to be female. With Persona 4, though, we needed the character to come from a big city to a small country town to be the driving force of the story, and it seemed more natural for a male character to fulfill that role. There are story aspects to this decision, as well.
Wait, what? Japan, no, this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever anywhere other than super-sexist-land where somehow it doesn't make sense to have a female move from one town to another or something? What?
(Oh, and like most games in the series, Persona 5 doesn't have any same-sex romance options either.)
Now, personally this isn't too big of a deal because based on the two I have, P2EP (which is a quite different game) and P3P I find the Persona games boring after a little while, since the visual-novel half is not a genre I have ever liked much and I don't find the dungeon-crawler side all that much either, but still, this is a pretty popular series now and this kind of thing needs pushback every time or it is not going to change.
So, I wonder, will Japan ever realize how far behind they are on gender relations and actually start to catch up on this? Because this is yet another example of how badly that needs to happen, tossed on the huge mountain of other such absurd comments we have heard before; even if we just look at games, the excuses why games like P4, Zelda BotW, The Last Guardian, and such don't have playable female characters are insanely bad and sexist! And then there's their frequent inability to even get the concept of a female character that is not sexualized... ugh. That problem's bad enough in Western games so I can undertstand why it is even worse in Japan, but it is often disappointing.
Of course, things like games, anime, and such are just a reflection of the culture of the nation that creates them though, which is why I asked the question I do, but regardless of that there need to be pushback every time says something like this or nothing will ever change.
Another Japanese game, another terrible excuse for not having a playable female char. - Dark Jaguar - 7th April 2017
I've recently watched not one but two Studio Ghibli movies where female leads go from a big city to a country town. Even "it's the Japanese culture" isn't an excuse for that... excuse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_Yesterday_(1991_film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Marnie_Was_There
I actually do accept the excuse that it costs a LOT more to have a female character playable, and even more depending on the amount of voice acting and motion capture involved. But, that only goes so far. When there's a clear gender gap, that excuse just leads to the question "okay then, but why do you pick a male lead so much more often than a female lead?".
I'll grant that Nintendo does a pretty good job not sexualizing it's female characters. Well, for the most part. The Zero Suit is the worst thing to happen to Samus since Ridley killed her entire family, I'm recently realizing. (This is called hyperbole, before anyone takes it too literally.) Intelligent Systems? I can't say the same for them. They've gotten worse and worse over the years, and not just in terms of that, but their storytelling is just so... paint by numbers now.
I've never actually bothered with the Persona series. They kinda lost me at "kids shoot themselves in the head to gain access to a magical world", and I never checked in since then.
Another Japanese game, another terrible excuse for not having a playable female char. - A Black Falcon - 8th April 2017
Dark Jaguar Wrote:I've recently watched not one but two Studio Ghibli movies where female leads go from a big city to a country town. Even "it's the Japanese culture" isn't an excuse for that... excuse.I'm sure it does cost more, yes, but as you say, then why do most games have only male characters... of course, we know the answer -- one part marketing research which reinforces what people expect to see with products that continue on those stereotypes, and one part sexism -- but neither of those are things we should just accept. Yes, the second reason is worse, but the first is a problem too of course because you need games with all kinds of protagonists in order to help get people to realize that there is more to game protagonists beyond just (white for Western games or white or Asian for Asian games) males!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_Yesterday_(1991_film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Marnie_Was_There
I actually do accept the excuse that it costs a LOT more to have a female character playable, and even more depending on the amount of voice acting and motion capture involved. But, that only goes so far. When there's a clear gender gap, that excuse just leads to the question "okay then, but why do you pick a male lead so much more often than a female lead?".
Now, on the other hand, is it better when you have some Japanese developers who do have female protagonists... which they then heavily sexualize, which they explain by openly saying that it's because they like that kind of thing? See Nier Automata, Senran Kagura, or Dead or Alive, for example. I'm not sure what I think of this, in some ways it's not much or no better than the developers with the terrible excuses for not having female characters because saying "I make sexy characters because I like that" is of course also stereotyping in an industry with far more not-beautiful male characters than female, but on the other hand, at least it results in games with playable female characters.
Quote:I'll grant that Nintendo does a pretty good job not sexualizing it's female characters. Well, for the most part. The Zero Suit is the worst thing to happen to Samus since Ridley killed her entire family, I'm recently realizing. (This is called hyperbole, before anyone takes it too literally.)I don't know, regardless of her outfits, Peach is of course one of the most negatively stereotyped female characters around. And she is sexualized in her designs too, at least some of the time. And yeah, Zero Suit Samus is a pretty bad design for a lot of reasons, I agree. Maybe Nintendo has sexualized character designs less than some Japanese developers, but they still have quite a few of them, and their stories and writing are terrible at gender representation.
Quote: Intelligent Systems? I can't say the same for them. They've gotten worse and worse over the years, and not just in terms of that, but their storytelling is just so... paint by numbers now.Fire Emblem has always been an anime-styled series in both good ways and bad, but yes, they have steadily increased the anime over time, to the point where it's probably gone too far... and in some ways it went too far long ago; that series has a long history of those terrible "scantily clad 1012 year old dragon girl who looks 12" characters. Yeah, in some ways the sexualization and creepiness are definitely worse now than they used to be, since they improved the graphics and added the relationship system in the GBA games for example, but it IS always a series which has had some of that stuff in it.
Quote:I've never actually bothered with the Persona series. They kinda lost me at "kids shoot themselves in the head to gain access to a magical world", and I never checked in since then.That's close, but not quite it; the "gun" things are used to summon the characters' Personas, their stronger alter-egos that they use to fight with. They don't gain access to the dungeons or what have you by doing that, that's how they fight back once in them.
As for the games, the first two Persona games are quite different, being more traditional story-based RPGs, but from Persona 3 on the series is half text-heavy visual novel and half dungeon crawler (set in a Japanese high school setting of course), with visible enemies and a traditional menu-based battle system. All games in the series have fairly dark plots though, fitting with games connected to the Shin Megami Tensei universe. I'm not a fan of that kind of thing either, so the stories aren't a draw for me at all. I don't know about you though.
Another Japanese game, another terrible excuse for not having a playable female char. - Dark Jaguar - 9th April 2017
I've never seen Peach sexualized in any of the games she appears in, or official artwork. I can't speak for fan art obviously, but in the games she's just Peach. Storylines are another matter, and I've made it clear her best official representations have been in Super Mario Adventures and Super Mario RPG.
Another Japanese game, another terrible excuse for not having a playable female char. - Great Rumbler - 26th April 2017
Persona 5 is pretty good.