Stellar Blade’s Eve is certainly sexy but is she sexist? (Picture: Sony)
Yoko Taro has talked about how ‘amazing’ Stellar Blade is, as he and its director discuss their fascination with sexy female video game characters.
Up until now, Sony has been pretty secretive about what exactly PlayStation 5 exclusive Stellar Blade is, with the game being most famous for its highly attractive female protagonist and her penchant for skintight clothing.
However, a recently released demo has allowed everyone to get a better handle on what kind of game it is. This includes famously eccentric, and horny, NieR creator Yoko Taro, who seems to be very impressed.
‘Stellar Blade is a really amazing game. I’d say that it’s much better than NieR:Automata,’ said Taro in a new interview. ‘The graphics are completely next gen quality and the character design’s direction is amazing.’
It transpires that NieR:Automata has been a major influence on Stellar Blade, with a new interview on IGN Japan showing that Taro and Stellar Blade director Kim Hyung-tae are big fans of each other’s work.
‘I kind of knew that Stellar Blade was going to be compared with NieR:Automata, and I told Mr Kim when we first met. If you actually play it, you’ll instantly realise that it’s a very different game, but a delicate female character doing cool action is bound to draw comparisons.
‘If Stellar Blade would have been the same game with a macho male character, I think people wouldn’t have pointed out the similarities. It just happens to be that there are not many games with a similar style.’
The two do spend a lot of the time talking about the attractiveness of the characters in Stellar Blade, with Taro commenting: ‘Shops in RPGs often have a close-up shot of the shopkeeper, which I don’t like because I think it feels unnatural. Stellar Blade has a shot like that too, but the shopkeeper was so cute that I didn’t mind! Her cuteness felt more important than any design choices.’
NieR:Automata – or to paraphrase Police Squad, the creator’s barely-disguised fetish (Picture: Square Enix)
2017’s NieR:Automata features the scantily clad 2B as one of the key protagonists. She’s become highly popular because of the way she looks, but she also has a nuanced personality and backstory, and is portrayed as more competent than her, less experienced, male companion in the game.
She’s definitely a compelling character, and the game itself is very good, but Taro has admitted that she’s designed the way she is because ‘I just really like girls.’
That may not be reason enough for some but the question for Stellar Blade is whether protagonist Eve will have an equally developed personality. Given some of the comments by South Korean developer Shift Up, it’s not clear that that’s been a priority.
Many of Shift Up’s previous titles feature even more sexually explicit female characters, with the studio known in its home country for its ‘butt jiggle’ physics in games like Goddess Of Victory: Nikke.
‘When it comes to the design, we put special attention on the back of the character because the player is always facing the back of the character when they’re playing. That’s what they see the most of, so we thought this was pretty important,’ designer Kim Hyung-tae told Games Radar+.
Eve is based on a real model – supermodel Shin Jae-eun – with Kim admitting: ‘Honestly, when I play a game, I would like to see someone who is better-looking than myself. That’s what I want. I don’t want to see something normal; I want to see something more ideal. I think that is very important in a form of entertainment. This is, after all, entertainment targeted for adults.’
Using the skin suit makes the game, and possibly other things, harder (Picture: Sony)
It’s a long running debate, going back through Bayonetta (who was designed by a woman) and all the way to key seminal female characters such as Lara Croft and Chun-Li.
The controversy surrounding Stellar Blade is particularly vociferous because of an incident involving Shift Up sacking a contractor and supposedly removing her work, and that of another woman, from the game because they were feminists.
South Korea can be very conservative when it comes to social issues and has a particularly influential anti-feminist movement, but it later transpired that not only had she broken into a shareholder meeting – which wasn’t likely to do much for her work status – but she was part of a controversial and intensely homophobic group called Megalia.
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Nevertheless, combined with Shift Up’s previous games, and some of the developers’ comments, it’s created a perfect storm of argument, that is only going to get worse once the game is released.
At that point it will become clear as to whether Eve is just a blank slate or a real character, but if she is the former does even that matter? Given that wouldn’t make her much different to most macho male video game characters from a decade or so ago.
Some might argue that we should have moved on from that sort of portrayal – for everyone – by now, but then again Stellar Blade is a fairly old school action game, where the story doesn’t seem to be terribly important.
It all depends on your point of view, but the one certainty is that trying to discuss any of this online is going to be almost impossible to do in a civil manner…
Stellar Blade will be released for PlayStation 5 on April 26.
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