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Bikini Armor Battle Damage: Sexy Armor Hypocrisy (?) featuring (some of) NeoGAF™

D

Dawg

Member
I saw Brianna Wu mention this blog post just now... and then I saw... the comments are from here!

tumblr_nh88wkrOMS1s755fuo1_r1_1280.jpg


tumblr_nh88wkrOMS1s755fuo5_r4_500.png


So Final Fantasy finally (all puns intended) decided to fully embrace its female-gazey nature and released initial promo pics with a male character not being cool and stoic, but under-dressed, sexy and vulnerable? Me like!

Aaaaand some gamers’ knee-jerk reaction is “Eeew, how is that supposed to be a man?! I’m never playing this!”? Me no like.
…But all the same, I’m not particularly surprised either. Sigh.

While screencapping the worst comments from that forum thread, I also noticed lots of other posts being like "I don’t mind sexy male armor, BUT this particular one is just a shitty design, period.", which is an argument far removed from the reality of current game industry.
The thing is, we’re waaaaay past the “badly designed sexy female armor” quota, so there’s lots of “badly designed sexy male armor” quota to meet. And until balance of the two is restored, I don’t really think anyone is in the position to request male sexyness to be up to some arbitrary design quality standard.

I’ll also hold my final judgement of the whole game’s art direction until we get to see female characters for comparison. After all, FF titles provided us with some major Female Armor Bingo material before.
Click to expand...

http://bikiniarmorbattledamage.tumblr.com/post/106906034228/wtf-is-he-wearing-ewwww-that-design

Do you agree the comments are silly, GAF? Or that the blog arguments are silly?
 
P

Parakeetman

No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
Dawg said:
I saw Brianna Wu mention this blog post just now... and then I saw... the comments are from here!
http://bikiniarmorbattledamage.tumblr.com/post/106906034228/wtf-is-he-wearing-ewwww-that-design

Do you agree the comments are silly, GAF? Or that the blog arguments are silly?
Click to expand...

Nope more the blogger trying to stir shit up.

As that is a fucking horrible design in general and even if it was on a female character it still would look like shit.

The worst part of the design is that skintight body bib. Its not even like a full suit but literally a frontal bib which you can see from the shots that show the backside of the character. Its just bad design in general.
 
V

vareon

Member
"The thing is, we’re waaaaay past the “badly designed sexy female armor” quota, so there’s lots of “badly designed sexy male armor” quota to meet. And until balance of the two is restored, I don’t really think anyone is in the position to request male sexyness to be up to some arbitrary design quality standard."

Huh, I disagree here. We want better standards for both, not lowering one because the other is bad. How are we getting better otherwise?
 
J

jesu

Member
So Final Fantasy finally (all puns intended) decided to fully embrace its female-gazey nature and released initial promo pics with a male character not being cool and stoic, but under-dressed, sexy and vulnerable? Me like!
Click to expand...

How is he looking vulnerable?
 
S

StayDead

Member
I'd rather have it like this where both sides have ridiculous armour. It's a fantasy game and I think it's good if games are as far from reality as they can be as it's a lot more interesting. Armour included in that. If every game used the same type of Armour (as in authentic armour) the characters would be incredibly slow and every game would look very similar. Either that or you'd have companies making the authentic armor have ridiculous colours and people'd just start complaining about that instead.
 
E

electroshockwave

Member
Which FF is this?

vareon said:
"The thing is, we’re waaaaay past the “badly designed sexy female armor” quota, so there’s lots of “badly designed sexy male armor” quota to meet. And until balance of the two is restored, I don’t really think anyone is in the position to request male sexyness to be up to some arbitrary design quality standard."

Huh, I disagree here. We want better standards for both, not lowering one because the other is bad. How are we getting better otherwise?
Click to expand...
Yeah, reminds me of an article I read arguing that the way to stop the salary disparity between men and women is to reduce men's wages.
 
P

Parakeetman

No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
Corpekata said:
And so are 9/10 of the women designs that seem to get a lot of defense.
Click to expand...

One of the few nice designs with a female character in armor.

HilSC4art2.jpg
Click to expand...

Monster Hunter has a bunch of other good and bad examples. Though there are a lot of female players in the country who enjoy a lot of the designs due to them meeting the various tastes of what is considered cute or not. Actually a lot of the female armors look better than the male counterparts.
 
C

Corpekata

Banned
StayDead said:
I'd rather have it like this where both sides have ridiculous armour. It's a fantasy game and I think it's good if games are as far from reality as they can be as it's a lot more interesting. Armour included in that. If every game used the same type of Armour (as in authentic armour) the characters would be incredibly slow and every game would look very similar. Either that or you'd have companies making the authentic armor have ridiculous colours and people'd just start complaining about that instead.
Click to expand...

There's no balance between ridiculous and armor so authentic it even abritrarily affects movement speed in a videogame?
 
C

Crossing Eden

Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
My problem with the armor wasn't the fact that it was bikini armor, which btw, always looks stupid, my problem was the fact that the design itself just looks stupid. Besides the generic white anime-ish hair and face that's pretty much a slightly different version of Hope from FFXIII, it's just not very interesting or visually pleasing to look at armor wise. Some of the leg armor looks like it's literally floating in place and isn't connected. And what is the arthur talking about when she say "not looking cool and stoic but looking vulnerable," What do you call that expression and pose?
 
W

wwm0nkey

Member
StayDead said:
I'd rather have it like this where both sides have ridiculous armour. It's a fantasy game and I think it's good if games are as far from reality as they can be as it's a lot more interesting. Armour included in that. If every game used the same type of Armour (as in authentic armour) the characters would be incredibly slow and every game would look very similar. Either that or you'd have companies making the authentic armor have ridiculous colours and people'd just start complaining about that instead.
Click to expand...

Fan service on both sides is always great IMO. Thats mostly how I see TERA and Guilty Gear. It sucks though when its one sided, if you're going to do fan service, give everyone a little something.
 
A

Abriael

Banned
1: Final Fantasy presented plenty underdressed/sexy (arguably) and vulnerable male characters before, so the "finally" reeks of ignorance.
2: "argument far removed from the current gaming industry seems to indicate that gaming industry would unanimously or even consider this a good design. Very debatable, and I don't think she can really speak for the gaming industry. Mind you, I personally don't consider it a bad design (I consider it quite fetching actually, and I'm all for equal opportunity sexyness), but I speak only for myself.
3: There's absolutely nothing wrong with not liking this design. I could see the problem if the same people expressed their enjoyment of bikini/sexy female armor, but the blog post doesn't in any shape or form demonstrate or illustrate that. It pretty much assumes it just from the fact that those commenting are gamers and male, which is very, very disingenuous.
4:The idea that since there's badly designed (arguably) female armor, it somehow creates a "quota" of badly designed male armor to fill is something I find absolutely ridiculous.

This particular person has been on a pretty radical crusade/witch hunt, and it has created some pretty bad aberrations in my eyes.

Remember the "women are too hard to animate" misquote of something an Ubisoft developer said a while ago? He was actually just saying that it's more costly and it requires more resources to create/animate/voice a female protagonist in addition to a male one, which is absolutely true, unless you want to do a bad job of it. How much more costly/resources intensive is debatable, but it without a doubt is, since you have to create more assets. Difficulty never factored in his argument (or in anyone else's to mi knowledge), it was simply a matter of budget/resources, and specifically in addition to a male character. It's a false quote that was actually never said and that it's disingenuously being used to fit an agenda.

Her and a few others turned it into the topic of a GDC talk.
http://reanimators.net/?p=597 (check Women Are Not Too Hard To Animate by Brianna Wu (Giant Spacekat) Mariel Cartwright (Lab Zero Games) Jonathan Cooper (Naughty Dog) Tim Borrelli (5th Cell)).

While I'm definitely in support of more diversity in character design of all genders (when it's not imposed at all costs, of course), honestly when developers throw colleagues under the bus by perpetuating a very bad misquote that falsely puts them in a bad light, I can't help but being a bit disgusted.
 
O

Opiate

Member
Mature said:
That design is bad. It would also be bad on a woman.
Click to expand...

My guess is that bad female designs get more of a pass. It's sort of like how a guy will give a stupid (But sexually appealing) girl a pass in many things, but they won't give a stupid (but sexually appealing) guy the same sort of slack.

With that said, FF doesn't seem to be the worst offender in gaming sexism by any stretch.
 
P

Parakeetman

No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
Crossing Eden said:
My problem with the armor wasn't the fact that it was bikini armor, which btw, always looks stupid, my problem was the fact that the design itself just looks stupid. Besides the generic white anime-ish hair and face that's pretty much a slightly different version of Hope from FFXIII, it's just not very interesting or visually pleasing to look at armor wise. And what is the arthur talking about when she say "not looking cool and stoic but looking vulnerable," What do you call that expression and pose?
Click to expand...

That and the shitty design of his sword that does not match with the armor design at all. It looks more like a hunk of metal than anything. Totally zero thought went into the cohesion of the weapon / armor design apparently.
 
W

WanderingWind

Mecklemore Is My Favorite Wrapper
"I don’t mind sexy male armor, BUT this particular one is just a shitty design, period.", which is an argument far removed from the reality of current game industry.

What a terrible argument. It's not "Either you agree this design is great, or you're just against men in skimpy clothes because something something industry." Zero logical connection between the first and second half of the sentence. The first half has no connection to anything dealing with the "industry" it's a statement of personal opinion on a single design.

Pretty typical though. You either have to agree wholeheartedly with my specific opinion, or you're really, secretly against progression.

And, oh by the way, this is hardly anything new in FF character designs.
Vaan.png


Bonus Dorian because gay dudes deserve some cheesecake too
tumblr_neiy9qN6Kv1ryr3o1o3_1280.png
 
V

Vermillion

Banned
Well the leg armor is dumb and I hate the color...

But wait - Final Fantasy hasn't been embracing the female gaze this whole time?
 
S

Shrike_Priest

Member
Some of the comments are legit, as in, I too think the design is somewhat horrible.

However, a lot of the comments are clearly sexist ("is that supposed to be a man", "some costumes just isn't designed to be worn by a man", "metrosexual" etc.).

You get to critique a bad design, however, people critiquing it because it's over-sexualised should be prepared to apply the same critique to any sexualized female design. And really, many of them are not critiquing it because it is sexualized, they're critiquing it because it's feminine. That's the problem here. An actual example of a hyper-sexualised male design would be something like new Dante. And that did get its fair share of critique.

I don't think the argument holds, because they're not complaining about it being sexualized, they're complaining it being sexualized in a way that doesn't fit the norm of how a man should be sexualized.
 
F

fabricated backlash

Member
Lol vulnerable... yeah vulnerable to fucking up his kidneys maybe. The pose and demeanour is anything but vulnerable.

I also object to the ridiculous assertion that anyone who calls out this trash pile of a design is sexist, and just now learns what it feels like for women to look at all those stupid armor designs for female characters.
Fuck that pretentious noise.
This design just sucks. Plain and simple. It's like rags thrown onto a mannequin and some tasteless late 90s tribal tatoos for good measure. It's like a male version of the abominations seen in FFX2
 
Y

YianGaruga

Banned
Is it really that surprising that a mostly male audience likes sexy female armor, but is put off by sexy male armor? Badly designed ot not (which in addition to "sexy, the one in the OP certainly is).

I'm not quite sure what the article's point is.

And to be fair, the design is pretty cool when compared to Vaan.
 
P

Parakeetman

No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
WanderingWind said:
"I don’t mind sexy male armor, BUT this particular one is just a shitty design, period.", which is an argument far removed from the reality of current game industry.

What a terrible argument. It's not "Either you agree this design is great, or you're just against men in skimpy clothes because something something industry." Zero logical connection between the first and second half of the sentence. The first half has no connection to anything dealing with the "industry" it's a statement of personal opinion on a single design.

Pretty typical though. You either have to agree wholeheartedly with my specific opinion, or you're really, secretly against progression.

And, oh by the way, this is hardly anything new in FF character designs.
Vaan.png


Bonus Dorian because gay dudes deserve some cheesecake too
tumblr_neiy9qN6Kv1ryr3o1o3_1280.png
Click to expand...

Vaan was more destroyed due to this shitty VA in Japan which a meme was born out of rather than how he looked. That and you can identify the general design with a "swashbuckler" type of look.
 
P

Psycho_Mantis

Banned
Opiate said:
My guess is that bad female designs get more of a pass. It's sort of like how a guy will give a stupid (But sexually appealing) girl a pass in many things, but they won't give a stupid (but sexually appealing) guy the same sort of slack.

With that said, FF doesn't seem to be the worst offender in gaming sexism by any stretch.
Click to expand...

What about the whole Cidney fiasco? Gladiolus got nothing like that.

While I agree with your sentiment, bad designs will receive backlash no matter the gender and the design in the OP is baaaad. Twisting it as some kind of hypocrisy for many of those posters is disingenuous.
 
P

Puaru1

Member
I don't think it's that bad a design, but the thigh plates look stupid and should go. Just have cloth or skin instead, or if it has to be armor, make it more form fitting.
 
D

Dunkley

Member
No thanks, I'd rather oppose sexy armor designs like that regardless of gender so they stop being a thing altogether. Putting them on a male character doesn't magically make them okay.
 
C

Crossing Eden

Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
Parakeetman said:
That and the shitty design of his sword that does not match with the armor design at all. It looks more like a hunk of metal than anything. Totally zero thought went into the cohesion of the weapon / armor design apparently.
Click to expand...
It looks like if he were to try to bend his legs that the knee armor underneath the seemingly floating piece of armor would collide and hinder his movement. And yes that sword design is god awful. Specifically what is holding this into place?

XVwDd6P.png


or this

fi9AnpL.png
 
P

Parakeetman

No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
Crossing Eden said:
It looks like if he were to try to bend his legs that the knee armor underneath the seemingly floating piece of armor would collide and hinder his movement. And yes that sword design is god awful.
Click to expand...

That too. Designs done by folks who have never put on actual armor / thought into how it would work when combined with realistic player movement. Cant wait to see what kind of jank ass clipping we are going to see with certain animations.
 
P

Pennywise83

Banned
Opiate said:
My guess is that bad female designs get more of a pass. It's sort of like how a guy will give a stupid (But sexually appealing) girl a pass in many things, but they won't give a stupid (but sexually appealing) guy the same sort of slack.

With that said, FF doesn't seem to be the worst offender in gaming sexism by any stretch.
Click to expand...

Indeed.

This design got a pass, and Fran is considered one of the sexiest FF characters:

Fran-concept.jpg
Click to expand...

It's not that different from Mevius main character's design. Cidney from FFXV got a lot of praise for her design, but she looks even more stupid if you consider that she works fixing cars and she's basically naked at the top, for no reason at all:

final-fantasy-xv-cindy-a-ukazka-mesta-a.jpg
Click to expand...
 
W

WanderingWind

Mecklemore Is My Favorite Wrapper
Parakeetman said:
Vaan was more destroyed due to this shitty VA in Japan which a meme was born out of rather than how he looked. That and you can identify the general design with a "swashbuckler" type of look.
Click to expand...

Sure, I"m just pointing out that the shirtless FF protag has precedent. And if you're playing Final Fantasy and being upset about "feminized" character design, you (general you, not Parakeetman) lack any speck of self-awareness. Amano's art work was beautiful, but it hardly conformed to "traditional" masculine designs.
 
yurinka

yurinka

Member
I don't care if characters are half nude or not, but personally typically I don't like the androgynous male characters like the one included in the OP, or others from Final Fantasy like Meg Ryan. I don't know why, maybe it's their haircut that makes me feel something weird when looking at them. But instead there are other oversexualized male character designs I love, like often half nude Street Fighter characters.

In any case, I think the artists should be free to design whatever they want, and that we don't have to censor or to force them to include or to not include certain types of characters that doesn't fit in the game story/concept.
 
A

Aske

Member
vareon said:
"The thing is, we’re waaaaay past the “badly designed sexy female armor” quota, so there’s lots of “badly designed sexy male armor” quota to meet. And until balance of the two is restored, I don’t really think anyone is in the position to request male sexyness to be up to some arbitrary design quality standard."

Huh, I disagree here. We want better standards for both, not lowering one because the other is bad. How are we getting better otherwise?
Click to expand...

Exactly. Tastelessness is subjective, but it's a totally different criticism to "ban this sexy filth".

I have no problem with this armour as a straight male. I'm in the camp that would love to see more men sexualized in games if it means people will stop complaining about Ivy's battle-thongs and warrior-pasties in Soul Calibur. There should always be a place for tit/dong physics, but perhaps this isn't it. I'm not an FF fan, so I can't comment on how appropriate sexy armour designs are in that franchise.
 
T

Tunahead

Member
What always weirds me out about these comments is the ones that talk about how "gay" it looks. Like, you look at and comment on Japanese character designs with some kind of regularity but haven't picked up on the differences between Western and Japanese notions of gay and straight masculinity?

In Japan all the skinny androgynous teen boys are considered the hyper-masculine ideal of being bad ass and strictly heteronormative bros. Like, Vaan from Final Fantasy XII is basically the Japanese equivalent of the Gears of War dudes.
 
S

SolidSnakex

Member
Pennywise83 said:
It's not that different from Mevius main character's design. Cidney from FFXV got a lot of praise for her design, but she looks even more stupid if you consider that she works fixing cars and she's basically naked at the top, for no reason at all:
Click to expand...

She has? Every thread about FFXV since her reveal has had people running in to complain about it, all the while completely ignoring Gladiolus' redesign. And the whole "she's a mechanic and wouldn't dress like that" argument doesn't hold up in a world where the main characters are fighting armored enemies while wearing designer clothing.
 
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