What the argument does is serve to highlight the boundaries and real concerns of the issue. People don't care that things are unrealistic so long as it doesn't make them feel uncomfortable sexually. People in this thread don't care that Luara (is that her name?) has big breasts, they only care because she's sporting cleavage which years of cultural conditioning has told them is wrong.
Eh, nothing about big breasts makes me uncomfortable. In fact, I'd say they're probably one of the most comforting things I could think of! Nothing wrong with big breasts or women having them, they're great. Real top-shelf stuff, you could say. But honestly, their large prominence in SFV so far is getting to be a bit much already. I'm not uncomfortable with big breasts as a concept, but at this point I AM comfortable in saying it's far more than a handful that are really busting out all over in a way that is just so over-the-top it's starting to get a bit heavy.
Listen, seriously: something like DoA, eh, that's always been their thing, I'm fine with it mostly, barring maybe some of the more fringe Beach Volleyball stuff like the voyeuristic camera mode thing which does come off as kind of creepy and gross. Big Bouncy Breasts With Fighting Anime Ladies Conveniently Attached has pretty much been the series, and they're upfront about it (Age Setting!) so whatever. There's absolutely an audience who loves it, and the devs are into it, and for all its pandering and cheesecakery the female characters have always all come across as general take-minimal-shit highly-competent badasses from what I've seen, and that goes a good way to making it all seem relatively harmless to me.
But if you're going to go that hard into pandering to a certain audience to such an extreme, you have to accept that you're not just going to have a larger part of the potential audience that's not really into it, you're also going to have a chunk just as large as your main audience that's extremely put-off by it. That's not really a problem, except when that pandering kinda becomes the norm rather than the exception.
That's the problem I'm starting to feel with SFV. Street Fighter has always had its sexy ladies (and dudes!) and that's cool, but it's never felt so... DoA to me until now. And again, I'm ok with DoA, but not so much with everything being like DoA. When I saw the new character was named Laura, literally the first thing I was thinking was "oh a new lady fighter, maybe she won't have real giant ti... nope, this is SFV I guess". And I like R.Mika! Always have! She's a damned showy luchadore wrestling vixen, the outfit fits the character and her counterpart Zangief is showing off more skin because she can't have the luxury of not wearing a shirt at all so...
Nobody bats an eye at a rippling mass of oily muscle like Ryu because culturally, we don't have that issue towards men, but women's bodies are pure and to even gaze upon them is like murdering unicorns.
So the characters in IV were obviously pretty exaggeratedly cartoony and everything, and V feels like it's just pushing that even further, and that's ok though I'm personally not sure I'm really into the look but whatever. But like, the thing with this example is... yeah, in a game with about super-strong fighter people where the character design is exaggerated cartoon, of course most of the charactersm especially the men, are going to have giant muscles. They're the world's strongest fighters! The majority of ladies having pretty uncommonly large breasts... not so much. I mean, if anything it seems like the exact opposite of what you'd expect to see; generally I've found that muscly fighty ladies tend to not exactly have the most prominent of breasts naturally. Don't forget that they're mostly fat, after all.
Basically: a character or two having giant boobs, that's fine. Great, even! Variety and all that, and again, I have no problem admitting I enjoy seeing large breasts. But the sheer mass of mammaries in V is starting to feel lazy at best, and immature, kinda gross pandering sexualization at worst. The Street Fighter series is unquestionably the premiere fighting series in the world, maybe it could feel a bit... classier? Instead, it feels like it's actually just regressing, and it's kinda a bummer.
And if any mod or tech person at Giant Bomb is reading this, for fuck's sake you need a better tagging system. It's ridiculous that we can't quote multiple posts, especially given this website's strong predilection for people holding multiple conversations with multiple people in the same thread.
If you hit the Quote button at the top right of whatever post you want to quote, it'll stick it right in the bottom of your post, if that's what you're asking for. It's faaaairly usable, though editing parts can be a pain.
Edit: This took too long to type and people mostly covered my points in the meantime so sorry about that. To be clear, not trying to go at you @oldirtybearon, when I started it this was all I had to reply to!
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