From Bayonetta to Team Ninja, inspired by the last Jimquisition.

[Beretta]

I agree with Jim about pondering Team Ninja; more specifically the DoA setting.

I'd really like some insight into why in context most of the female cast comes dressed down. In some cases their could be passable logic-Tina's a pro-wrestler/model/whatever and that means showing off her physical fitness (ditto Mila), but the ninjas are really the head-scratcher. I get that part of it's Anime Armor Rules (ie armor does nothing so why bother) but is there any sense to be made of the rest? Like are the clan rules "if you can't fight naked and survive you weaken the clan by living"? Is it just arrogance -"the Muggles are so incompetent they can't possibly present a threat"?

Maybe nobody notices. Maybe the "Kunoichi Outfit" started when the normal infiltration role was as as servant/concubine/dancer and never evolved because those roles never attained any more social prominence in TN's world. It might be easy to hide in plain sight when you're dismissed as a combination dishwasher/sex-toy and you should be as disposable as any low-level genin except that you aren't anonymized with a mask and are more likely to end up strangled in a boudoir instead of dead of stab wounds in a random field.

Is there any sense to made of it?

 

[Batou667]

Buddy, I think if you're trying to put DoA's outfits in a real world context you've already missed the point.

DoA is very heavily stylised, to the point where it's almost CG anime with an MTV aesthetic. Everything is "rule of cool", and the outfits, particularly the female ones, take it to the logical extreme by cranking the "sexy" and "unique/characterful" stats up to the max. This is a game where you can play as a kung-fu fighting opera singer, remember.

But OK, to dip into the in-game context for a bit.

- Tina, Lisa, Mila are all wrestlers/MMA fighters and their standard costumes are actually pretty real-world believable.
- Hitomi also wears pretty functional martial arts gear, and her "street clothes" costumes are mostly quite sensible
- Lei Fang and Kokoro both wear very elaborate costumes which although blatantly impractical are based on their canon, i.e. Tai Chi master and Geisha.
- Helena dresses like a crazy person. Her long ballgowns are impractical, her stripped-back opera outfits aren't particularly believable. But like I said, who ever heard of a fighting soprano...
- Christie's outfits are either 1960s-inspired "spy" catsuits or else sexy costumes that are partially explained by the fact that she often uses sex as a cover to get close to her targets


And finally, those ninjas... I don't think it's meant to make much sense at all. Kasumi and Ayane's outfits both have influences of ninja gear but they're terribly impractical. The real purpose is to underline their good girl/bad girl characters, emphasise their youth/femininity, and of course fanservice.

 

[WarpZone]

Yup. It's stylized, not realistic. But "do these outfits make sense" isn't the question you should be asking.

The real takeaway from the Jimquisiton episode is to understand that Bayonetta is stylized and sexualized in a way that implies the character chose to dress that way, because she could, not because she had to. Whereas DoA just layers on the fanservice tropes regardless of whether it makes sense for the characters or not, because the game developers could.

It's "because the developers can," VS "because the characters can." That's all.

Of course, actually leveraging this principle in future games and franchises might require some new tropes, which themselves could become tired after a while. For example, it might mean that all your characters need to be gods and demons like in League of Legends, people whose actual ability to resist damage is determined by their Power Level, not what they wear. Or perhaps that everyone in the game's setting owns an energy shield like in Borderlands, and once that drops no armor known to man can actually protect you, so nobody bothers to wear physical armor and just dresses for fashion purposes. Something of that nature.

More to the point, though, it also requires writing and animating female characters who look and sound like they know what they're doing. The "performance" of your digital actresses need to project confidence and agency. That may mean discarding a lot of the older, more submissive tropes where anime franchises are concerned.

Or just, you know, explicitly marketing your products as fanservice for straight men.

 

[go-10]

yeah what has been said so pretty much hits the nail on the head

to add to them though if we look at the latest game and use the C1 (default costume) as the "canon" costume then Kasumi and Helena are the only impractical ones. Everyone else pretty much wears casual clothes or clothes that normal people in that line of work wear... maybe Christie, but I've never met/seen a professional assassin so I'm not really sure

BTW, is this DOA argument only valid for the women because some of the men also have impractical clothes. Just look at Ryu, I mean sure he's dressed for the part but really if you wore such skin tight clothes it wouuld only be a matter of time until you suffer from a heat stroke and/or have difficulty breathing.


and despite what people say, while still big their boobs are not bigger than their heads or anything crazy like that

actually it wasn't until the OPTIONAL DLC started coming out that the game delved into lewdness, which weirdly enough it was the fans of the game that started demanding it

 

[Maximum Bert]

DOA and Bayonetta are games first and everything else second if you try and apply are worlds rules to them it will fail. For fighters its not uncommon for their move sets to be based on real world martial arts albeit very loosely DOA does the same sort of thing.

DOA is founded on sex and violence just as Mortal Kombat is founded on violence and sex and to be honest it helps identify the brand just as large detailed strong character designs and flashy special moves helped make street fighter 2 so big. With these games there is no room to establish the character through the game because essentially all you are doing is fighting over and over and the focus is on competition the characters must stand out on appearance and style from the way they dress to the way they move in game as for their personalities you generally dont have much text to establish that maybe a blerb in the manual and a few intro and outro texts in the fights (which most skip anyway).

The core costumes in DOA are fairly sensible as far as the genre allows but again a huge selection of costumes ranging from normal(ish), sexy, silly, and iconic has always been a staple of the series ranging from DOA1 on PSX although ofc the iconic costumes did not become that until at least the second game i.e the characters established costume (usually the one they first appeared in).

To be fair DOA is fairly sensible for a fighter its more out there than say Virtua Fighter but its not as silly as Tekken (yeah! boxing dinosaurs) or Soul Calibur (hit someone in the face with a battle axe and they arent dead or cut up). Then theres the 2D fighters where the real crazy stuff happens.

DOA and Bayonetta are what they are they dont try and hide their sex appeal its what the series has always been and more importantly they are also damn good games that are great examples of the genres they are in. Dont confuse real life with games.