games

20500 readers

247 users here now

Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.

3rd International Volunteer Brigade (Hexbear gaming discord)
Chapo Gamedev Discord
ChapoChat NationStates Region
Vanilla Minecraft Server
The Axe and Sickle DnD Discord

Rules

No racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, or transphobia. Don't care if it's ironic don't post comments or content like that here.
Mark spoilers
No bad mouthing sonic games here :no-copyright:
No gamers allowed :soviet-huff:
No squabbling or petty arguments here. Remember to disengage and respect others choice to do so when an argument gets too much

founded 4 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Nintendo is being weird with their women protagonists (Invidious link) (redirect.invidious.io)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

64 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Quite a good breakdown by Laura Kate Dale of Nintendo's handling of recent games featuring playable women characters from franchises usually headed up by men i.e. recent Peach game and upcoming Legend of Zelda game featuring the titular Zelda.

Featuring such Aonuma bangers as:

If we have Princess Zelda as the main character who fights, then what is Link going to do?

The triforce is made up of Princess Zelda, Ganon and Link. Princess Zelda is obviously female; if we made Link a female, we thought that would mess with the balance of the triforce - that's why we decided not to do it.

We feel like what takes priority is this idea of gameplay. If it turns out that particular gameplay we're trying to bring to fruition would be best served by having Zelda take that role, then it's possible that that could be a direction we could take.

i.e. Zelda has featured exclusively MANLY gameplay up to this point btw

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Oof, yeah that stings. Classic Nintendo tho. It's almost like they view these characters as some kind of archetype that repeats itself across time - Link is the hero, Ganon is the villain, Zelda is the girl. So then if someone is getting kidnapped, well that's Zelda's role, couldn't be anyone else of course

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I've had entire struggle sessions in the past about that, here included.

Some people believe that because things have been that way for the Zelda franchise that they could only have been that way and can only be that way forever after. morshupls

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

A peculiar case of capitalist realism. Reminds me of the dull, fan pandering hollywood remakes like the recent Avatar live action show, where the people working on it have no idea what makes the original great and just end up reproducing the signifiers of the story ("omg it's that character I know!", "I found the master sword!", "the princess is getting kidnapped!") without the substance to back it up - it's like one huge reference to the previous work.

And then when someone dares to play with investors' blood pressure and rethink the formula a little bit (like BotW) it gets seen as incredibly innovative, because the norm is for the industry to be stagnant asf. Indies stay winning tbh