John Bartle

Good question. Stellar Blade is a great game. I never platinumed it because it eventually got repetitive, but I had a lot of fun with it! I like the character designs a lot, although the women’s faces are a little too samey and stylized for my taste. (I’d probably tone that down 10%, but that’s purely personal preference. The beautiful man in the game actually struck a better balance for me.) And the story was… not great. Feels like a lotta games ask, “How can we make the combat more appealing to look at?” Stellar Blade completely commits to the question “How can we make the protagonist more appealing to look at?” whcih I respect as an artistic expression. That obviously doesn’t mean every female protagonist needs to be sexy. It has to fit the game. Samus and Selene from Returnal are cool as hell because of her armor, combat and tech. Jesse in Control is badass because of the way she moves, flies and uses her powers. They have appeal in different places. IMO Stellar Blade helps reopen a more interesting question: why are games in the East still so willing to play with idealization of characters’ faces in a way Western games USED to, while Western games seem only comfortable idealizing bodies and environments? Despite the fact Films idealize like crazy with makeup & lighting. I also see that consumers can't even tell when something is stylized or edited. Some seem surprised to learn that Suicide Squad characters heads are stylized. But they would probably be stunned to hear the Until Dawn heads also when through an enhancement pass to make them more appealing. I also think some Western games have become so focused on scan data & facial authenticity that we sometimes forget how much traditional media manipulates reality too. Actors spend hours in a makeup chair before appearing on screen. Then you have lens locked to 85mm and up, camera angle curation, extra fill lighting, diffusers, grading and retouching all working together to present a face in a wayy more flattering way than you would ever see it walking around in real life. I haven't even discussed Catamenial Pigmentation or Premenstrual Edema that happens to women near their cycle. If you head scan a woman on her period you will literally get a blotchier, puffier face that is barely perceptible in real life but shows in scan data. Which is why I find some of the discourse around Western female characters silly. People saying “They made her jaw bigger on purpose” without understanding how much presentation affects our perception of a face. Makeup artists often make a woman's jaw darker and her forehead brighter for example. Put a woman on a low camera angle with a 50mm lens and harder lighting and her jaw can appear much stronger. Shoot that same exact woman for a movie poster with a longer lens, a slightly higher angle and soft diffused fill, and suddenly her face appears much more delicate. Her jaw didn’t change. Plus, a game let's you see from every angle, whereas a woman in a movie might only be seen from 9 angles over 23 minutes of runtime. Audiences have spent their entire lives looking at women through extremely curated photography without necessarily realizing just how curated it was. So when games present a scanned face under gameplay cameras, gameplay lenses and dynamic lighting, they sometimes interpret the difference as the developers deliberately making the woman less attractive. So it's curation problem that seemingly only gets solved with heavy stylizaton/editing of the head. Like I said. This conversation sucks on Twitter because it's hard to get into the nuance, and it's more of a 2 hour podcast conversation because I've only scratched the surface. Contrary to belief, I just say whatever I want and I think it's fine to critique all forms of Art, Design and Media if you do it in a constructive way. That’s a much more interesting conversation to me than whether every female character should be sexy or not. Or whether scans always suck.