Dragon's Crown Designer Apologizes for Exaggerated Characters

[Johnson McGee]

'Well-endowed' characters are pretty much expected (even if it's not exactly fair to women's self-image) in this kind of game but the grotesque tumours on the chest of that sorceress look like they're about to shear strait off her chest from weight strain.

 

[Requia]

It also wouldn't be much fun to have thighs the size of two Rottweiler dogs strapped to your loins.

It's fun until you have to find pants that fit.

I don't get why the Sorceress is drawing so much of the attention here. Even if you're going to insist that exaggerating female secondary sexual characteristics is worse than exaggerating male secondary sexual characteristics, at least she has fucking clothes, the amazon is expected to fight monsters in her underwear.

though I guess that means she doesn't have to find pants that fit.

 

[likalaruku]

After seeing the sorceress & the insanely muscular Amazon, I'm surprised they didn't go for the other common extreme fetishes; a lolita, a morbidly obese woman covered in stains & crumbs, a woman with breasts the size of a monster truck who is so weighed down she can't movie, a 4-breasted cow Kemono, a fox Furry, a Futanari (shemale), a schoolgirl who likes to show off her panties via martial arts, a shy Megane with pigtails, a Miko, a cosplay waitress, a flat-chested woman with a massive badonkadonk & thunder-thighs (bigger butt than sorceress, less muscular thighs than amazon), & an axe-crazy Tsundere.

 

[emeraldrafael]

I think its good he apologized for what he did on facebook with the three dwarves. I understand what he trying to say and hte point he was trying to make (cause the guy at kotaku was completely wrong in his article about why its offensive for the sorceress to exist as is but say the massive dwarves are an alright image and definitely helped the stereotype of videogames being a boys club). but the art itself... I dont find anyhitng wrong with. yeah the amazon and sorceress are big buxom women I'm sure without much help can be made into masturbation material, but so is the giant ass dwarf and knight/paladin guy so neither really feels out of place. The image is there not as an affront to women but more just the style of the game and homage I guess to what these types of games were. He's not presenting any of these charaters as the next great gordan freeman or anything of that nature. they're just stereotype old school designs for an old school stylized game.

 

[Moonlight Butterfly]

It's not the style of the art that bothered me it was mostly the sexualisation of the sorceress character compared to the others.

She looks so characterless and she doesn't put across that she's a powerful sorceress.

With the Amazon I at least appreciate the attempt at drawing a muscly woman for once.

 

[Wintermute_v1legacy]

"You should apologize!"

I guess that's what is wrong with the internet right now. A whole generation of idiots who think they're so special getting to decide who companies should hire/fire based on what they said on Twitter. This is no different. "I don't like his character designs! He should apologize!"

How do these people even manage to live in the real world, where you don't get to have everything your way?

 

[klaynexas3]

I'd defend all of the characters except the sorcerer and sorceress. Neither of those two were made with a single ounce of originality. I mean damn, at least have given them a damn bobblehead, not the stereotypical elf look. Besides them, the other characters do look relatively original. Enough so that I actually decided to take a look.

But I don't see why unoriginality would make anyone uncomfortable, in fact, quite the opposite. Just boring, old, safe, comfortableness.

I don't know what everyone else is talking about.

 

[Roger]

As far as I know, people wanted him to apologize for the homophobic response to being called a 14 year old boy, not the character design.

...am I the only one who saw Mr. Kamitani's comment as "You didn't like the exaggerated female designs, what do you think of my exaggerated male ones?" Responding with the dwarf image as sort of a "hey, you're missing the forest for the trees" ribbing, and emphasize "hey, EVERYTHING in this game is so over the top that Frank Frazetta is giving his thumbs up from heaven"?

 

[Candidus]

It's not the style of the art that bothered me it was mostly the sexualisation of the sorceress character compared to the others.

She looks so characterless and she doesn't put across that she's a powerful sorceress.

With the Amazon I at least appreciate the attempt at drawing a muscly woman for once.

The exaggeration of life-giving or life-nurturing assets, which unavoidably also sexualizes a character I accept, is part of a pattern with this guy's necromancers. He takes those attributes and applies them to characters who give life to the dead.

There's a more detailed analysis of that and his history of doing it somewhere on the internets. Personally, I think it's clever and interesting. I also find it sexy, not going to lie. But even if the artist were to make the same admission, I don't think that relegates his adaptation of the necro/lichdom trope to some kind of irrelevant ulterior motive.

I'm not saying you're wrong or to blame if you dislike it, either. Just that, there's a reason she's ``that way`` compared to the others. It isn't arbitrary.

I'll hang fire on making any character judgements until I've played the game. After all, Odin Sphere's promotional material couldn't have done justice to Odette, Queen of the Dead with just a light action trailer. We'll see. I believe in Vanillaware.

 

[LKArtillery]

I think the Amazon's design would be PERFECT if she just had compact boobs and was completely bottom heavy. The ginormous thighs really work for her design-- she looks like she can crush someone's head like a grape in-between those puppies.

Honestly, as a girl, I don't mind sexy characters. But I think that it's a much more interesting cast that has females of various shapes and sizes as well as men. Or better yet, some male characters who clearly appeal to females... ;P If you want to put a lady in a bikini that's fine, but please give me a walking shirtless scene hunk to compensate haha.

One thing I just find plain bizarre in this game though are the animations. They look really... awkward. Like they were too lazy to actually animate any of the game assets, so they just took the concept art and used the warp tool to give the illusion of movement. It makes all the characters look like they're made of Jello. :s

 

[Gigano]

Well, as long as he doesn't actually change the design, I suppose saying "I'm sorry your offended" is fine. I'd pity people who're offended by a game they don't have to buy too.

 

[MrBaskerville]

I´m not sure i see the problem, yes the sorceress is sexualized, but there are also other kinds of female characters in the game (if the trailer is any indication) i never saw it as a problem that female characters were sexualized but more that there really weren´t that many alternative types of female characters in games, this one seems to get that part right.

 

[JoshuaMadoc]

I'd much rather fight Jason Schreier to the death than cave in to pressure from him and his cronies. Why cower when I can make a defiant stand as a selfish artist enjoying what I do best?

 

[LiquidGrape]

The issue was never the exaggeration in design. Never. The issue was the disparity in purpose, which was incredibly suspect at best.
Schreier's particular critique was infantile, but it held a grain of truth in pointing out the bizarre, disproportionate pandering of the design.
And frankly, considering Kamitani responded by making a not-very-subtle homophobic jab? Yeah, I've written him off as a creep.

 

[6_Qubed]

The only thing anyone making Dragon's Crown should apologize for is making it a PS3 exclusive.

I wanna play. :c

 

[Signa]

You know gamer community[footnote]Not necessarily The Escapist community[/footnote], you guys make me mad. This guy did nothing wrong, and yet everyone needed to stomp on his artistic vision. I'm sure there are people that defended the ME3 ending because changing it would damage the medium's artistic integrity, yet forced the guy to apologize for drawing pictures the way he wants them.