Well to get technical…Konoha is wearing IIRC a Japanese female gym outfit. If you go to Japan that’s basically what the girls wear to PE. This is just me going by what a female Japanese friend has told me from living in Japan. I would doubt she’s wrong but that’s what I’ve heard. It may not be at all schools but it has to be common at some of the schools if she brought that up straight up.
In Japan its common to wear short skirts to school also as uniform so you can’t blame them for visualzing something that is regular in Japanese culture. For those that play SFIV and Sakura…you already know she has an outfit just like Konoha’s “shirt and panties” outfit that as an alternate. She’s not trying to show you her camel toe, that’s just what she and any real life Japanese girl would wear at school.
Konoha is the only real character in the game that’s going to give you anything close to a panty shot and that’s more or less because it’s culture with real life women in Japan. I’ve played the game enough times to remember that Skullgirls goes way out of its way to force panty shots.
One of the girls is like a 10 to 12 year old girl wearing a playboy bunny outfit…but…without the bunny ears and tail it could be a gymnastics outfit really. There’s not as much blatant throwing out panties out there like SFIV’s Sakura or a few of the women in Skullgirls.
The whole point in bringing up AH was that people make judgements based on its fans all the time, and shouldn’t… but that at the same time fans shouldn’t pretend they totally hate the look and are playing despite it.
I should have dug a bit deeper for a better example though, we don’t need another AH/fetish-fodder discussion, its been done about 4 million times
But the question everyone is asking but no one wants to answer is…
why was not *one *male character designed for launch if Skullgirls wanted to appeal to the fighting game masses (especially newcomers)?
Sure you can throw the “no penis = shallow” argument but that’s really kind of weak.
Bluntly speaking, A fighting game is an “adults version” of playing pretend superheroes.
But instead of a sandbox and a costume cape, you play with a controller, console, and a character that basically embodies “you”.
Now it’s usually more appealing to a man to play as a man for pretty obvious reasons. Back in the day you probably didn’t imagine yourself as “Ms.Marvel”. You probably wanted to be batman or spiderman, aka awesome-looking dudes who were also powerful dudes. The same thing applies here. You can have a shitload of powerful, sexy, women. But still, that inner-child isn’t really persuaded by boobs. He still thinks that guys with superhuman powers who take names and kick ass are still number one.
Sure, maybe Spiderman shifted to Goku overtime and then Goku to Ryu. But the concept is still the same.
I honestly think Skullgirls would have much broader appeal if it wasn’t hampered down with so much…fetish fuel. If the cast had a more even ratio of genders I could see many more people ignoring the art style and actually willing to try the game. But as of now it’s kind of like
"Oh Tits and Ass everywhere, that’s cool. But uhh if I want that I can get it from much better sources, real or digital. Meanwhile, Let me go play as this trenchcoat-wearing, demon-hunting, badass, Dante mother fucker and wave my fucking huge sword around. Hey did you see his sword? IT’S FUCKING HUGE! "
Even if Skullgirls is leagues better than a game like MVC3 balance-wise, MVC3 has the flashiness and “cool-factor” that’s missing from Skullgirls.
plenty PLENTY of people like to play as female characters, firebranded (I was one for years until I kind of quit caring, still use female avatars usually too :p)
It has a lot to do with aesthetics, too… and to why a lot of people play MMO’s with female characters even though they’re not intending to pretend to be a chick.
You want whats on the screen to be something you want to look at. A cute/sexy chick is very often what people want to look at.
~
In your example, playing superheros has everything to do with Identification, and I don’t think playing games has much to do with that very often. Liking Makoto doesn’t mean you wish you had huge jugs and a choking fetish, but rather that she’s attractive to see and exciting/dynamic (mainly honestly due to that neck scarf).
Oh and maybe eventually because you like how she plays too ><
Still… even though I like the game I think a lot of it is a bit too obnoxious. Say what you will about the rampant sex appeal used for character designs in say, Street Fighter, but at least the entire cast doesn’t look like you could tip them over with a poke because they are so top heavy. >_> The only characters in SG with practical boobs are Ms. Fortune and Pinwheel. (And I guess Peacock, but she’s kind of whatever.)
I hope we get some male characters via DLC. I’d like to see some of those characters in the backgrounds as DLC – the girl standing with the shark guys in that one port stage and the guy and the girl (who looks remarkably similar to Queen B from Darkstalkers) in the lab would be great to play as.
I don’t mind playing as female characters, but typically I play as male characters that appeal or relate to me in some way. Its silly, but I feel most comfortable with characters like that, and the more I like a character’s aesthetic the more I enjoy training to use them.
SG has cool characters, but I’d definitely like to see more — particularly a few male characters.
To the people Sirlin hating: HDR was a huge success so shut the the hell up already
To the people making Marvel comparisons: Skullgirls looks amazing. The chatacter concepts are fresh and fun. The sexualization is a parody (right?) But you can’t compete with Ghost Rider smacking around Viewtiful Joe. Or Phoenix Wright taking Dr. Doom to court. It’s a cool factor earned by decades of comic/gaming history.
Needless to say. I like having so many games to play. Marvel, SF, SG, SC, Tekken, SFxT, TxSF, KOF, BB for life!!!
Yeah sure, tell yourself that why you cry because for better or worse when people are looking at the titties in this damn they aren’t going “Damn that’s clever” they are mostly going “Damn dem titties.”
No one is really arguing the fact that some people like to play as females. The issue is that we currently have NO choice but to play as females and it isnt gonna change for a while since the 2dlc characters are girls too. It baffles me , with the amount of cool guy characters I’ve seen from the Skullgirls universe(Duc, Panzerfaust and Big Band) that they did not think it would be a good idea to atleast put one of them atleast for marketing purposes.
You are projecting. I was just saying to someone about your posting (particularly on the front page) earlier “he makes a lot of good points but he also does this annoying thing of acting like he has the secret insight into every issue that everyone else is too dumb/too in denial to understand” and here you are doing it again.
I agree with this simply because it’s for sure true that casual players care a lot about aesthetics, and ultimately, you need to get the casual players to be a tournament success nowadays because nobody will get behind a game that doesn’t have hundreds of pot monsters playing it, sadly. It’s definitely disappointing that a creeplord like Alex Ahad was the only person Mike Z could find to team up with to get this thing done.
parody is very often an excuse, but that’s hardly a surprise, it makes plenty of sense that people are uncomfortable with that kind of thing. We should give people some slack on the issue, nobody here wants to be quizzed on what they find hot.
I did want to expand on the ‘deviantart’ comment above tho; the skullgirls art has very little to do with western animation as we know it, but rather is like an american artist copying a japanese artist trying to copy the style of '20s animation. It has very little to do with Foxy or Betty Boop, less to do with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, and almost nothing to do with Scooby Doo or He-Man (or for that matter like Dexter’s Lab or Adventure Time).
Not of course saying people aren’t allowed to like it, we all have our own tastes, but it has a lot more to do with the anime aesthetic than it has to do with any western animation aesthetic.
