The Dredge Tank

I mean, it's not Dead or Alive, but i still get tit pain just from thinking about going through a swordfight with the amount of jiggle physics some of these women have. And when i compare the character designs, it's kinda noticeable that none of the women are wearing full plate, or show visible scars, or look older than mid 20s, or are hulking frankensteins, flaming skeletons or piles of magically mutated flesh growths. It's all in all fairly conventional when we look at how fighting games do gender, only men get to be monstrous or fully covered up while all women are conventionally attractive and show it at least a bit - the more overtly sexualized ones go for a scary Domme look, the others are largely cute and girly, the feisty one is a Harley Quinn cosplayer to highlight how crazy yandere lolrandom she is. Pretty run of the mill. The few men that are sorta-kinda sexualized tend to be queer coded (fast fencing twink with visible bulge, steampunk kinkster weirdo from hell) and their sexuality is still less in-your-face than Ivy's to not make straight people too uncomfortable. There's a few handsome guys in there, but it's not surprising they do not flash their abs as much as the girls do.

I mean, don't get me wrong, i'm not trashing the game here. I don't even mind Ivy's character design, i have friends who dress like that at Pride or at the dungeon and i'm more than fine with that, plus she's got a freakin whip sword. She'd probably be the first character i'd play as in this game, i get why the study had results like this. Lots of women will be like "come the fuck on" when they see that artwork, but it's not surprising to me that the study results change depending on whether the tested group saw footage of the game or got to actually play it. It's not the character design that's gross, it's how gamers react to it, or how they would flip their shit when she'd lose a cup size in the next entry of the series. And that's something you think of a lot more when you just watch. When you get to act instead, dressing immodest and whipping people can look very different.