Arc System Works has been really receptive towards criticisms regarding their PoC characters (as shown by them fixing Nagoriyuki's lips), so I'm at least somewhat hopeful that they'll do right by Giovanna.
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Colorism in video games (Open spoilers)
- Thread starter Deleted member 511
- Start date
If I don't get any other thing this year in gaming, this would be my one.
Avoid this the stereotypes and make a strong character, I desperately want to love her character and we need more ladies like her (🤞🤞🤞)
And this ultimately is a bullshit excuse that is just an easy way for latently or overtly racist (and misogynist) publishers/studios to get out of representation. If the product is good, comes from a team of good pedigree who's put hard work into it and has actual marketing behind it as opposed to being sent out to die (because it's felt not to be marketable), it will do well - same as any other game/film/show etc. This is being shown now repeatedly with strong women protagonists, and it will hold true when publishers and studios just finally have enough decency and courage to represent women of color as well.
Also, you should throw those pics in the OP, they're amazing.
Honestly, her & Nagoriyuki are the ones pushing me to pick up GG Strive.
Yes yes and yes. Love this topic and was honestly searching for something similar when Final Fantasy XVI trailer dropped.
FFXVI looks dope, but the whole time I couldn't help but see how white everyone was. I understand you can base the game off a certain 'setting', but that doesn't mean brown people cannot exist. It is still a fantasy universe and not the real 'earth'. It doesn't even have to matter about temperature, climate, 'grounded reality' or whatever nonsense excuse people come up with for 'lore friendliness' which is just a cop out anyway.
As a long time FF fan, it sucks that I can no longer get excited about series I used to enjoy after realizing how much I do not exist to them.
FFXVI looks dope, but the whole time I couldn't help but see how white everyone was. I understand you can base the game off a certain 'setting', but that doesn't mean brown people cannot exist. It is still a fantasy universe and not the real 'earth'. It doesn't even have to matter about temperature, climate, 'grounded reality' or whatever nonsense excuse people come up with for 'lore friendliness' which is just a cop out anyway.
As a long time FF fan, it sucks that I can no longer get excited about series I used to enjoy after realizing how much I do not exist to them.
Won't lie, you and I are in the same boat.
Granted I'm more hype for Gio, but the fact they took feedback on Nagoriyuki, and they are putting love and care into him has me equally as happy at his inclusion as Giovanna's...sadly that is largely the only characters that have spoken to me in the base roster.
All they have to do now is stick the landing by getting black actors for both of them. Though given that ASW made sure to get a black actor for Venom back in Xrd Sign's dub, I'm not too worried.
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You're definitely right and that's why I'm hoping Project Athia doesn't flop. Apparently SE wants it to be a big new IP so that hopefully means it will get a lot of marketing - especially with Sony being involved. I remember Playstation having a screencap of the game as its twitter banner after it was announced.
And that was a great suggestion so I went ahead and added them to the OP!
The bolded hit. I'm still...excited about the series in a way but I feel like there's a huge asterisk when I talk about it these days. I think what makes the FFXVI situation worse is that a lot of fans don't even care. Sometimes I'll post in XVI threads about how I'm concerned about the lack of brown/black people and I'm pretty much get ignored / no one comments on it. The lack of representation for other fans doesn't matter because people are too busy hyping over getting a game like XII again or a single player FF made by some of the XIV devs to be critical of how white the game is. It sucks.
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As a fan of a lot of SE games, I'm glad more fans are pointing out their issues with colorism:
Also shout out to Surakian for making a thread about the Nier issue.
Also shout out to Surakian for making a thread about the Nier issue.
I was already pretty lukewarm on the Nier rerelease, but I think I'm good now. Saves me some money anyway.
Project Athia can't come fast enough.
Project Athia can't come fast enough.
Project Athia is now titled Forspoken, coming to PS5 & PC in 2022
Lines up with the trademark Square filed last year which people thought Endwalker would be
www.resetera.com
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2022 baby!!! (although I think they need to fix the lightning for her skin).
Yeah, the cutscene they showed had her looking kinda weird but overall, whoo! I would guess Jan 2022, but that leak was already wrong since I think it said Kena was March and that was way wrong.
Need to see more of the combat but I'm already in day 1 regardless, honestly. Her design is so cool and it looks great in motion!
I'm sorry if this is too old but i didn't see anyone answer you so I thought I'd give it a crack.Can anyone who has played League of Legends touch on how the brown and black characters are treated in the game? I'm a 'fan' of K/DA but have never played League but I have noticed they do have a decent variety of PoC (I'm sure I've missed a few):
However, I've noticed that some characters have straight up inconsistencies in their skin tone in some of the art for the skins? This is supposed to be the same person:
The same thing happens with another character, her skin tone just...drastically changes depending on the skin:
Riot has been pretty great over the last few years when it comes to black and brown characters releasing some excellent characters and supporting them with high quality skins (2020 came with a Samira a badass brown woman and Rell a young black girl). But they weren't always good at it, those 2 (Sivir and Nidalee) being the poster childen of that.
This is not to say that the problem is gone, while Sivirs last skin had her normal skin tone and her League of Runeterra appearance shes still brown, it was only 2018 (when they should have already known better) when they released her Pizza Delivery skin that makes her lily white (note the in-game model shes still brown so its just her splash art).
As for Nidalee, her last 3 skins have her be blue for the Cosmic Huntress Nidalee skin (2020), her normal brown skin for Dawnbringer Nidalee (2019) and similar to Sivirs skin above white splash art with brown model for Super Galaxy Nidalee (2017)
Interestingly enough another one of their oldest brown women, Karma has never run into any of these problems. She brown in all her human skins.
This is Balan without the hat.
Kinda feel like this counts towards colorism considering that it kinda invokes the "paler = nicer" stereotype. For reference, this is what Balan normally looks like...
Kinda feel like this counts towards colorism considering that it kinda invokes the "paler = nicer" stereotype. For reference, this is what Balan normally looks like...
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This is Balan without the hat.
Kinda feel like this counts towards colorism considering that it kinda invokes the "paler = nicer" stereotype.
Was hoping the bump was for this... LOL. Like come ON man.
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.........I have a lot of questions.This is Balan without the hat.
Kinda feel like this counts towards colorism considering that it kinda invokes the "paler = nicer" stereotype.
what the heclThis is Balan without the hat.
Kinda feel like this counts towards colorism considering that it kinda invokes the "paler = nicer" stereotype.
This is Balan without the hat.
Kinda feel like this counts towards colorism considering that it kinda invokes the "paler = nicer" stereotype.
Had to look up the context as its kinda meaningless without it, but this is a real "bruh" moment.
The context was added to the original post.
Woof! Seems like another one of those bad examples. Though it looks a bit confusing. I'm going to assume Balan is wearing gloves?
Thank you for explaining!
I might be replying for the first time in this thread. I enjoyed reading it and the examples shared are very true and hard to deny. Some games like FF especially hurt since they're one of my favourite games. 2B and the Virtua Fighter character are downright offensive. This topic is very personal. I unintentionally always felt that the lighter the skin, the more beautiful you are. I didn't know why I felt I was lucky for having a lighter skin for an Arab. Then I got exposed with certain videos about an experiment with children always picking the lighter dolls etc. It hit home how damaging the media has been about affecting us like this. For a period I mostly consumed Japanese media and it's very prevalent there. Some Jpop stars/idols start their careers with darker skins and then you gradually notice how lighter they get. I'm luckily over that phase. I now get happy when I see minorities and dark skinned characters. I also make sure to comment on how positive it is whenever it's appropriate to talk about it with friends and family.
The OP is also talking about how dark skinned woman are only allowed to have a tough personality. This is another true example where a lot of damage has been done. When it comes to SE games in particular, I hope we get a female Sazh in the future. He was so refreshing and a well fleshed out character. They can do it, we just need more.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts OP. I'm sure it must have been difficult to talk about your favourite games like this or dealing with this your entire life.
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Idk what any of this means because I didn't play this game but:
Someone tried to explain the different designs and I'm still confused lol. So Balan is a 'persona' for the pale guy? Even so, they could've made unhatted Balan have darker skin rather than...what he looks like now.
Why is their jaw a different color when wearing the hat?This is Balan without the hat.
Kinda feel like this counts towards colorism considering that it kinda invokes the "paler = nicer" stereotype. For reference, this is what Balan normally looks like...
I suppose its meant to represent mystery and his face cloaked in shadow like in this example from FF14, in the example though the face is completely obscured and you can only see the eyes while in Balan's case I think its meant to show that the hat shades his face.
Really doesn't excuse it though because combined with the hair it does make it look like Balan is a dark skinned character when he's "mysterious and magical" and pale as snow when he's "pure and good" and that's really questionable
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This whole thing is fascinatingly baffling to me:
So 'Balan' is good and Lance is the antagonist....but they're the same person? I think? Why is Balan running around with a black mask(?) and wig on then????
LmaoooooThis is Balan without the hat.
Kinda feel like this counts towards colorism considering that it kinda invokes the "paler = nicer" stereotype. For reference, this is what Balan normally looks like...
It's the hair texture change for me.
Say what you will about his face being permanently cast in shadow, but why does the "evil" version have dreads, and the "good" version have silky hair???? Takes the whole thing from coincidence to some form of intentional.
Lol, seems pretty shameless
Damn this is upsetting. Just make a character dark for goodness sake, it's ok.
This is one thing that I can just say is simply anime. Anime is allergic to black (the color) hair in general, preferring white/blonde/green/blue/red/etc.
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Apparently neither version is evil (at least from what I've gathered?). The whole thing is still weird though.
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Final Fantasy Black Mages are a closer example:I suppose its meant to represent mystery and his face cloaked in shadow like in this example from FF14, in the example though the face is completely obscured and you can only see the eyes while in Balan's case I think its meant to show that the hat shades his face.
Really doesn't excuse it though because combined with the hair it does make it look like Balan is a dark skinned character when he's "mysterious and magical" and pale as snow when he's "pure and good" and that's really questionable
CK3 is better for it, imo. It detaches culture from race and has a ruler designed built in, so you could technically create a black lady ruler of iceland without having the opinion penalty for not matching culture you would in CK 2 (and in CK 2, tribal rulers are hardcoded to be really really difficult to play with a female ruler). If you don't want to play with historical gender laws, you can do that out of the box, make things equal or even favor women over men. If you wanna play a female ruler with historical gender laws you could also grind faith, found a new religion with different views on gender and the like. You can also play with sexuality, make LGB people less uncommon or make them the dominate sexuality, also has asexuality. You can play as any african faction on its map out of the box (basically central/northern africa) it has asian and indian factions (not all the way east, but it gets to about Tibet).
Overall, CK 3 is a surprisingly complete game coming from paradox (practically a law that they release games that are hollow on release that become awesome after 10 DLCs or so). It's got most of the functionality of CK 2 with some additions out of the box without needing the mountain of DLC CK 2 does.
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I updated the list with the recently released game Subnautica: Below Zero, a game that features a black woman as the main character. Thank you to Urban Scholar for bringing it to my attention.
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*Salutes*
Wherever there's Black characters especially Black femmes I'm be sure to report it.
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Great thread.
Not sure what I can add, but I have been a gamer since I was a child in the Gameboy days and Miles Morales on PS5 was the first and only time I feel represented and it is not even an exact representation of both black/latino character. First time a character of Puertorrican decent and a decent black protagonist. It inflated my heart playing the game and I can only imagine how it would feel for me and all if this happened more often with other races other than white.
Not sure what I can add, but I have been a gamer since I was a child in the Gameboy days and Miles Morales on PS5 was the first and only time I feel represented and it is not even an exact representation of both black/latino character. First time a character of Puertorrican decent and a decent black protagonist. It inflated my heart playing the game and I can only imagine how it would feel for me and all if this happened more often with other races other than white.
Shouts out to Eiyuden Chronicle Marise:
For a really awesome black girl design. It remains to be seen if her character uses the aggressive personality or not but as far as the design goes it is really awesome. They didn't try to watch wash her by giving her white people features or hair.
This character needs her own series of games. What a design.
Nintendo is slowly darkening Daisy skin tone back and I hope that it's deliberate.
Alright. So as many of you are aware, after Super Mario Land 1, Daisy all but disappeared until the N64 when she returned for Mario Tennis. But upon that return there was a change. She'd gone from somewhat generic Peach recolor: To having her own look, complete with a noticeably darker skin...
www.resetera.com
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Posting this since I mentioned the issue with Final Fantasy often not having characters' skin color reflect the people who live in places some of the game locations are inspired by. Someone on twitter is doing edits to show what characters would accurately looked like if that was taken in consideration and I thought they were cool:
Basch looks so much better.
Basch looks so much better.
Well fuck i never knew Vanille design was inspired by Himba women, wish they made her a little darker in XIII. Also Basch looks 10x better like that.
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This definitely happens - Nadine is a glaring example - but I wouldn't say always. I know smaller, indies games will hire black women so I feel like it's more of a problem in the AAA games space - especially since you don't get to see black women in these bigger types of games anyway (which is a problem within itself). I know Forspoken is using a black woman for the main character's design and VA, Deathloop uses a black VA for Julianna and Arkane also got another black woman to voice the black female character for their new upcoming game as well. I'm sure there's others I could list that I'm missing. I know FFVIIR seemed to make an effort to match voice actors with the characters' race regardless if it was a main character or an NPC (Tifa's VA is white though which seems like a noticeable outlier). They even had black women voicing black female npcs in the game which seems small but I was impressed that they did that.
It's very weird lol. It also just visually limits the cast a lot imo. The above tweets are just edits but the cast of XII is uplifted a lot by how different and more unique everyone looks now instead of them all just being white and blond. It's the same with Vanille - I feel like the colors of her outfit pop nicely against the darker skin tone. The design is beautiful to look at like that. Throwing in more skin tones color wise livens up a lot of these games and hopefully companies catch on lmao.
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Oh, this is something I've seen happen over and over. Not just in games, it also happens a lot in anime, and live-action. White washing of characters but keeping the original clothing design has been done in so much media. It's even been done throughout history.
I totally missed this thread when it first started, but I wanted to say that it was an incredible read, Celes. More designers/writers/artists need to know about this.
I've been well aware of colorism in media, thanks to a previous relationship, and it's a shame not much has changed since. I can only say this: If you're white, like me, and you want to write or design a character just do your research. Find someone who is familiar with the region you're basing your design on, find a sensitivity reader, and please get rid of the stereotypes that have been bashed into your brain thanks to a lot of media you've grown up with.
Brown man here, and I've always noticed this issue in games and in movies/tv shows as well. I feel like for movies we sometimes at least get to see less colorism and stereotypes at times and even then it's usually only because there are black people directing said films. In terms of videogames I honestly can't think of one dark skinned black woman that doesn't at least exhibit one stereotype. I do hope that will change so that future generations can have better positive representation in games.
These are all awesome
These are all awesome
It's a complaint I've tried to levy whenever it's relevant in conversations like this, especially when it comes to people making the stupid argument that 'japanese people just don't know about other cultures!'.
Japanese devs have had absolutely 0 problem aping other cultures for their games then wrapping them up in their white/japanese/'anime' aesthetics to make their casts as homogeneous as possible. If they can take the culture, they absolutely could take the people as well, they simply choose not to, unless they can find an excuse to utilize some blonde-haired, blue eyed person.
Thank you for this topic. Just stumbled upon it and have been reading through. There is certainly a storied history of using darker features and skin tone to depict evil characters- the Kingdom Hearts example is one that I hadn't considered. Lots of game series I love are super guilty of this- Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, Final Fantasy XII.
Also appreciate the game recommendations. Ikenfell looks fantastic
Also appreciate the game recommendations. Ikenfell looks fantastic