I feel like this probably isn't going to come out right, but, here it goes anyway. Prepare mouth for insertion of foot.
It's great to see more games that buck stereotypes and tropes, really. I'm absolutely for seeing more games that have strong female characters in leading roles that weren't designed from the ground up for sex appeal. I also, however ,think there's a whole other problem that such characters can get flack if they seem too much like "male characters with a quick female paint job"- essentially the same grunting stolid space marines, just with an armor redesign and a different voice... And equally get flack if they're in any way vulnerable, quickly earning an unwarranted "oh, she's just another damsel in distress" just for trying to give the character some depth. Both Last of Us and Tomb Raider seem to have received a certain amount of punishment on these lines, and it's hard for me not to sympathize at that point with a designer wanting to say, "You know what? I'm tired of trying to placate you, so kindly @$#% off."
And on the other side of things, I bought Remember Me from the Steam Summer Sale, paying a bit more than I would have for a game I was uncertain about in part because I wanted to support a developer who had fought tooth and nail to keep their strong female protaganist. And... it's not a very good game. It's not a bad game, by any stretch, it's just a very linear one, quick to disempower the player if they aren't cleaving strictly to a very limited intended way of doing things. But more damningly, it has a whole theme of memory manipulation to work with, yet fails to really gel the "memory manipulation is a horror" sentiment with the fact that three quarters of the people whose memories are re-spliced by the heroine become better people for it, and largely sets the "this is what memory drain does to you" bar at "it turns you into a fast zombie."
...Seriously, Blade Runner did more interesting things with memory manipulation more than thirty years ago, and it wasn't even the primary focus of the story.
So, yes, there's this strong heroine, of mixed racial descent, no less... And a tiny part of me wonders if they wouldn't have been better off focusing their creative energies on story, rather than this one character.
I guess ultimately, my love for the idea of games that push and expand the boundaries doesn't push as far as suggesting that every game should have to do so, or that games that don't are always deserving of criticism simply because they could have used their place in the spotlight to push a more progressive agenda and failed to do so. Shakespeare used plenty of plot lines that were borrowed from fairy tales and Greek and Roman theater, tropes that were hundreds or even thousands of years old even as he re-immortalized them. I'll happily cheer a game that make me feel like their unconventional transgender multiracial protagonist stakes their claim as if they've always been there, and leads a terrific game that fills me with joy to play. But I'm not necessarily going to ***** and moan (yes, I'm aware of the word choice) if an otherwise great game fails to supply a female protagonist.
What was it Jim said about "innovation", before?
