The Official Super Smash Bros. Brawl Thread - See you in March!!

[A Black Falcon]

The outfits...I'll give you that one. They're not what you'd call battle-suitable nor modest.

Battle-suitability and historical accuracy are the main issues here, really, and the ones I'm talking about decisively fail both of those tests. Modesty is something that depends pretty much completely on culture, though -- humans have no built-in sense of modesty that I know of, it's all learned. (Otherwise why are there some jungle and desert tribes in which people never wear clothes, period? They'd wear something if modesty was genetic...) That fact, along with "we can design whatever we want because it's a game", are why why the costumes pretty much conform to modern-day cultural ideas of costume, not 16th century ones or anything else: they represent the culture of the game's creators, not of the supposed era they represent.

They usually make an attempt with at least some a character's costumes, in most cases, at least. If you want greater accuracy many of the characters DO have an option. Not all characters, and not in all games, but there are some more accurate options... the more monster-like characters like Voldo have no 'accurate' costumes of course, but Voldo isn't exactly based on a historical culture. These costumes are sometimes heavily modified -- short or partial skirts instead of long ones for female characters (though really female warriors would probably wear outfits much like male warriors, for protection, and not women's clothes... but they decided that wouldn't look as good and, more importantly, doesn't show off skin, so out that goes for most costumes.), etc.

Talim and Xianghua both have fairly small chests. Raphael and Voldo are not at all muscular or physically large. The fighters are varied in many ways.

Sure, there's an exception for every rule... but the rest? Sophitia (who, other than the extremely large breast size, remember, also had a child between Soul Calibur I and II, which in the real world often changes things) and Taki are the least realistic (seriously, before the mid 20th century Japanese women had very small breast sizes on average...), but looking at the rest they're mostly not much more plausible; are those really 'small' or just 'small in comparison to the REST of the cast'?

But hey, like you said. That's what the market wants. There is bound to be a lot more word of mouth between male gamers about Sophitias massive breasts than there is to be for Sophitia's historically accurate suit of armor.

Actually her third costume in the original Soul Calibur actually involved a full set of armor, I think... that might be her only one though. :)