@humanity: Man, 100% this. It's old and tiresome at this point. Personally, I'm at the point where if it's an act (and I really think most of it is) I think it's actively disrespectful to the audience. This type of comedy that is openly disdainful of its audience's time, intelligence, and willingness to engage is awful.
I find it telling that Abby also said that the game is not her style, she doesn't like the gameplay (a somewhat common criticism of the game), she thinks some of the story elements are heavy-handed (a point that Alex and Vinny both agreed on to a degree), and she doesn't care for the art style. They even agreed to some extent about the character's costume. This is not nearly the same as her comments on Bayonetta, which had a design that she didn't care for without ever playing it.
Yet people latch onto one part of her criticism--a criticism that is shared to some extent by at least two of her male colleagues--and I just cannot imagine why.
Okay Nier fanboys, tell me this, why the anime body pillows don’t suit up in their battle armors they used in Route C from the beginning? Give me reasonable answers, as I won’t accept “it’s because Yoko Taro likes girls”, “I like to gaze at my waifu” or similar perverted answers.
There is no explicit, established in-game reason, at least that I can remember encountering myself. The actual reasons for their outfits, taken from interviews, go as this:
Q13. Is there any reason the YoRHa member’s outfits are based on the gothic lolita style?
The world of Nier Automata is way into the future, where things like appearances and sizes have lost their meaning (just because you stand out doesn’t mean you’re strong). Though there were multiple choices for the YoRHa’s costumes, the individual who came up with project YoRHa chose the color black for a particular reason.
To a question asking why a combat android wears high heels, Yoko Taro answered that the game is set 10,000 years in the future, so when he tried to imagine what it would be like, he thought about how it was 10,000 years ago, and people back then probably would not have been able to imagine what it would be like nowadays. That’s why he decided to think freely and willfully about it. Since a lot of western games feature space marines and that kind of concept, he let his ideas flow freely and came up with a girl wearing heels in the future. Yet, the biggest reason is simply that he just really likes girls.
That reasoning is pretty funny, and I wonder if there's something lost in translation here, because it actually doesn't make sense. In trying to imagine the future, the designer literally imagined that females will wear high heels. His ideas "flowed freely" to a thing that exists and is not even all that unique when it comes to video game action protagonists.
@mrfluke: I think the thing to remember here is that women--even American women--even American women who identify as feminists--are not a hivemind. (As someone who recently made a similar comment regarding American sensibilities about sex, I understand the very generalized cultural point that you're making and agree on that aspect, but I've also seen plenty of cosplay of sexy characters at American gaming conventions.) I'm not aware of what the larger conversation about Nier: Automata has been, but I distinctly remember there being a pretty stark divide in how women viewed Bayonetta.
@smackosynthesis: Not only did KotoR use a d20 based system and feature feats and dice rolls, you could actually view a log that showed the math behind those rolls! I think it might actually be one of the last Western RPG games to do that, until the return of old school CRPG style games in the past five years or so.
So this has cameos of main characters throughout the campaign, huh? That is something I absolutely fucking despise in Star Wars media. There are an infinite number of stories to tell in a universe this big.
@elite49: Look, how do we know that someone* really likes games, unless they start every video or podcast with a list of their favorite old and current games?
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