17th June 2016, 7:50 PM
Dark Jaguar Wrote:Their excuses are terrible, but I'm personally not really concerned about it one way or another. Everyone talking about the new Doom and no one's put ID to the question on why Doomguy couldn't be Doomgal. It's a worthy question, and we need more female protagonists in gaming, but it is weird that Zelda is the series that got all the focus.
Zelda is an action-adventure game, maybe an action-RPG this time, not a FPS. People have different expectations for the two genres. Doom is an FPS, a game in a very male-heavy genre both in terms of audience and characters. Sure choice might be nice, but it's understandable that the character is male... and anyway, when you're in a first-person view which gender you are isn't quite as obvious as a third-person camera. But in comparison, action-adventure and RPG games have lots of female characters, and more female fans too. There is much more expectation for that kind of game to have a female character option.
Also, Zelda has been getting this focus for many years now, it's not some new thing. The series is one of Nintendo's most popular with core gamers too, which on top of the other reasons above adds to the focus on the series.
Sacred Jellybean Wrote:Link is already kind of androgynous, swapping the gender wouldn't make much a difference.This seems fairly obvious to me, yes. You'd think that this would be obvious to most, but given the climate these days it's hardly surprising that some defend Nintendo here... and I think the core of it is, the more progress in fighting sexism society makes, the more some people lash out against that. It's too bad that Nintendo's conservatism often ends up with them beeing in the behind-the-times camp.
Quote: Relying on old tropes is a crutch for the creatively lazy. Even if you don't want to alter Link's gender, at least put in levels with Zelda as a playable character. Give her a more active role than weak woman kidnapped by bad man, need good man to save her. Talk about some caveman bullshit.The reason why this has frustrated me for so long is that ever since the early '90s, Nintendo has teased with given Zelda a stronger role in Zelda stories... only to pull back every time, never let you play as Zelda, and ALWAYS have her get kidnapped in every game. Zelda helps defeat Ganon at the end of several Zelda stories, after he rescues her, including the 1992 Nintendo Power Zelda comic (where Zelda's actually the one who kills Ganon, after Link freezes him), Ocarina of Time (not in a combat way here, though), Wind Waker, and Twilight Princess. And OoT has Shiek and WW Tetra, for some additional more active Zelda roles... but in both games, as soon as Zelda becomes a regular princess again, she gets kidnapped because that's what you do with princesses, have stupid caveman "rescue the girl" plots with them. Bah. Of course though, this still leaves Zelda with a better role than plenty of other damsel-in-distress characters, in those games at least; many other Zelda games have Zelda in an entirely traditional "rescue-the-girl" role and thjat's it, but at least most of the 3d titles go beyond that... if only Nintendo would notice this. But no, it's "playable Zelda would leave Link with nothing to do" ludicrous backwards sexism.
Seriously, all we need is a Western-made Zelda game again and it'd have playable Zelda in it almost certainly... even back in the early '90s the Zelda cartoon had Zelda in a strong role, on top of 2 of those CD-i games, and we've had a lot of progress since then. It might not be as good as a Nintendo Japan title, of course, though... but it probably would be more representative.