Small changes are still changes!!! It's NOT EVEN about the change it—wait, MORE cleavage? *walks away whistling*
Code: Veronica was never supposed to be 3 (this is a misconception that persists no matter how many times it's clarified), and it's arguably far less meaningful to the plot than 3 seeing as the destruction of Raccoon City and the resulting litigation pertaining to the outbreak were what brought down Umbrella in the first place, rather than some epic showdown with the company suggested in games preceding RE4 that ultimately never happened. Ultimately the only things consequential about C:V relative to the overall plot of the series were establishing revived Matrix Wesker and Chris getting smacked around by him motivating him to bulk up, along with the C-Virus in RE6 being partially derived from the T-Veronica Virus.
By now unfunny jokes have become a convention in otaku works. They are as much a necessary part of the story as the beach/onsen episode. You can think of it as the standard substitute for good characterization.
It's just sad really. So far characters are decent (if very cliched), the battle system is great, and the world seems interesting. There there are just those baffling design choices 🤷♀️
So I finished Nioh 2 last night.
Overall it's about the same as Nioh 1 when it comes to female representation. There's one questionable design, the Kasha boss (a feline yokai monster with giant tits... yeah xD it's somehow not as bad as it sounds?), but she's not really that much worse than Hino-Enma or Jorogumo from the first one, and the presentation isn't so bad, no camera zooming in on her cleavage or anything that I recall.
And like the first one, the human characters are all pretty tasteful, with some genuinely cool characters. Mumyo is my favourite, she's a totally badass yokai hunter, and a cool character in her own right:
They also had a young woman missing an eye as blacksmith for some reason (it's a different one, as the game is a prequel), probably just as a fun throwback? She looks cool anyway:
But yeah, while they are younger ladies, the blacksmiths have avoided falling in the stupid creepy/loli nonsense, and are perfectly fine. There's also a few ladies of the court, like Princess Noh (Nobunaga's wife, she is basically a yokai boss in Nioh 1) and Lady Oichi, and Lady Maria from the first game's DLCs makes a brief appearance, and none of them are trashy or anything. So that's great. Good job Team Ninja!
Except... OK there's something super weird that's been bothering me. In Nioh 2, you play as a half-human, half-yokai character (created), and the game is a prequel to Nioh 1 as I said, and it spans multiple decades. Your character, being half-yokai and all, does not age. OK. The named characters the protagonist meets do age, such as Nobunaga, Tokichiro, Hattori Hanzo, etc.
...But not the women. Mumyo's appearance is the same when you meet her early-game, and in late-game, literally decades later. Some have tried explaining this by saying Mumyo's medallion (which is tied to the protagonist's dagger, there's lore stuff about this I won't get into here) is what grants her this immortality, except it doesn't explain why Lady Oichi doesn't age either, and in late-game Mumyo no longer has this artefact and yet still doesn't age. The blacksmith not aging, I could just see as a lack of attention to detail (she's basically a "menu" character, not a story one), but it feels kind of obvious to me that they just didn't want to age the women. And... that kind of sucks.
Yeah, that sucked. She did that to a different character in a previous game in the series, too (second game in the Crossbell arc, Ao no Kiseki/Trails to Azure).
I think it comes down to they just didn't want to, which is disappointing. You don't normally get too much for older women in games and they had the perfect opportunity here for that.
Lore wise, that race as a culture wears clothes that expose their back. Not saying that's a good thing.
Oh it's worse than that. In the game, it's basically played for laughs. Yes she's a villain/antagonist to the heroes (but technically so is Duvalie, the victim), but this scene isn't meant to show her as an evil creep, but as a funny one.
Yeah that's the worst. The scene technically shows her as a creep, but is played as a joke. That's just ... err ... does not compute.
Just finished it. She's really great. I want a RE 3.5 with her and Carlos.
Yeah her new design is great. People can compare her to new Lara Croft but that is doing her a diservice.
Agreed.
It really just seems to be the Resident Evil team. The rest of Capcom still did stuff like the horrible Street Fighter 5 costumes, everything involving Lady and Trish in DMC5, the Monster Hunter World armor designs (complete with a character explicitly saying he needs to make the female armors sexy).
True, I was more so thinking of the RE team.
Could you hear my sigh wherever you are? That just removes any possible defense for this.
