Starglider wrote:
4 games are based on tired 8/16-bit mascot platformer franchises. Mario, Sonic, Zelda etc have introduced or better characterised some female characters over the years but they still focus on male protagonists. What exactly do you want here? Should this franchises be dropped (not going to happen as they are such guaranteed earners)? Should characters like Princess Peach be reinterpreted / rebooted? Should new strong female characters be introduced and placed on an equal footing (e.g. selectable/playable alongside/instead of the main characters)? Essentially this is easy to do if there is minimal story/characterisation, expensive if you want extensive different cutscenes for different characters. Saying these franchises are relics of a sexist era is easy, saying how to modernise them while retaining profitability is harder (and no saying 'discontinue them' will not achieve anything).
Or they could just, you know, let them be playable characters, like they've actually already done. She mentions Peach's original playable role in Super Mario Bros 2 (Her complaint was about how it took all that for it to happen), though she doesn't mention Paper Mario, where while Peach
was kidnapped, many sequences in the game allowed you to play as her, thus allowing Peach to have some agency in her own rescue and not just be a helpless prize.
For Zelda, she mentions how in several games, Zelda has contributed and helped Link in his adventure. Note that those times, particularly as Sheik/Tetra, are considered favorite features of the series by all fans, not just the ones lacking Y chromosomes.
Note how she never complained about the Sonic the Hedgehog series. For all it's faults, they make just about every single female character in the game playable, and many of them have equal billing to the Male protagonists (such as Sonic Adventure 2 and the Sonic Rush series).
So the solution, obviously, is to take those examples I just mentioned,
and do more of that.
2 Assassin's Creed games; overwhelmingly male characters due to historical setting, there just weren't that many thematically appropriate historical females (or serving in the military, for the mooks) to work with, and also very heavy character/plot integration makes choice of protagonists impossible. It isn't obvious how the writers could have done better here.
But that didn't stop them from putting Aveline as the heroine of Assassins' Creed III Liberation.
