Poll: So Castle Crashers was awesome -- until it forced me into being a lecherous jerkface

[persephone]

It's not that I object to lesbians in games. If I'd decided I was playing a lesbian or bisexual (which, for the record, I have done before, more than once, in other games), then that particular aspect wouldn't have bothered me. I almost regret bringing that part up, given it was rather secondary to the rest of the post. It wasn't about the lesbianism, anyway, it was about the game giving me a blank character then dictating that character was a lecherous, selfish person (and a man).

I hadn't thought of the scene as satire or parody, but now that enough people have pointed it out, I can sort of see their point. Yes, that attitude was common in medieval times, but ... if you play it completely straight, is it really a parody? Cause I saw no levels of parody or satire there, I just saw it being played straight. If the woman had, say, rolled her eyes before going along with it, or at least been briefly disgusted at the fighting, or there had been some kind of wink or nod in there that indicated some kind of parody, it would've been a lot easier to swallow. But it was simply a straightforward, "here is your woman, she is a mindless prize with boobs, fight over her and whoever wins gets her."

I can also see people's points about the game not being deep, but I wasn't expecting (or even wanting) anything deep, honestly. I was just expecting the game to not trivialize women. That's not about depth or a good plot, that's about basic common sense. That should be a given.

Still, it was a serious gut punch, and in my case at least, it wasn't effective as parody/satire at all. The next time my sister and I play Castle Crashers, I plan to just give up at the end and let her win, because I don't want to fight my teammates in a context like that. Or go smooch a mindless woman-prize.

 

[shintakie10]

well shit whatever you do, don't play Battle Block Theatre, you can push cats in to water. Would hate for you to go on another pointless tirade.

Dude, don't be a prick, how would you feel if after beating the last boss in gears of war you suddenly had a scene with Dom and Marco fucking each other in the butt?

What the fuck is wrong with you people? She encountered a situation that kind of came out of no where and made her uncomfortable and you shitheads are just pilling crap on her? WHY!?

You don't even seem to try and understand what is bugging her about this, you just assume she wants to take away your videogames.

If they weren't so roided up I'd actually be really down with that. Like if they looked about the size of the first Carmine? Mmmm...sexy. Totally out of place, but still sexy.

 

[Bombiz]

I can also see people's points about the game not being deep, but I wasn't expecting (or even wanting) anything deep, honestly. I was just expecting the game to not trivialize women. That's not about depth or a good plot, that's about basic common sense. That should be a given.

This isn't an excuse but when Castle Crashers was released feminism in gaming wasn't really a thing and there wasn't that much of a discussion about not trivializing women in the gaming industry.

 

[nomotog_v1legacy]

I'm not going to sit here and say that you aren't allowed to be upset over how this game portrays women, but I think you need to think about the context of the game before you get upset about it.

Castle Crashers is a silly/cartoony take on medieval fantasy. It's poking fun at the kind of old school medieval fantasy where women were considered prizes to be won by the big strong manly man, and where all a man had to do to prove his worth is be manly. The whole thing about the woman being a mindless prize and ready to fall in love with whoever is the winner that's meant to be a joke.

As far as the whole thing about comrades in arms being ready to kill each other over a woman at a moment's notice, that's also historically a part of medieval fantasy. If I'm remembering the King Arthur legend correctly (and there's a good chance I'm not), at one point Arthur almost kills Lancelot after finding out that Lancelot has been having an affair with Guinevere, but Lancelot escapes and that event is what begins the decline of the knights of the round table. So again, I'd say this sequence where the two castle crasher knights are fighting over a woman is just a joke about medieval fantasy.

If it is meant to be a joke, what is the joke and why is it funny?

 

[Dalrien]

Rolling your eyes in disguist is the rather modern Day approach and i doubt Many princesses act like they do in the movies when a burly man displays himself, if we are talking historical accuracy but whatever works for you.

Does diminsh the pvp part of the game, sadly.

 

[persephone]

I guess someone is missing the point of the game making a parody if the Double Dragon ending.

I can't even validate the anger, I mean, the issues you complain about is legitimate, but the place you decided to look for something to pick on is beyond logic.

It's like getting mad at Team America for its portrayal of Muslims instead of I don't know, CoD 4.

 

[Weaver]

Castle Crashes is not an RPG. I think it's entirely fallacious to just randomly allot an entire backstory, personality and even sexual identity to what is a reskinned avatar then get upset when they game fails to adhere to a narrative you literally just made up in your head.

 

[briankoontz]

Would or should this be upsetting? Does this upset other gamers, or am I just overreacting?

This has upset me for 20 years, so I'm used to it. As an apparent first-timer, I welcome you to the club.

Here's something to think about - you know the knight who goes off to kill the dragon, one of the basic impetuses for the entire RPG genre of video games? There's typically a princess being rescued in the deal, and despite these being marketed as "kids games" the underlying assumption is that the princess is not so much being rescued as being married off to whoever is "manly" enough to claim her. In this misogynistic ecosystem the dragon is a GOOD thing because it allows knights to display their manly bravery and the resultant claiming of the sexual prize. It hardly matters that countless peasants die to the dragon prior to (and also after in cases where the knight doesn't kill the dragon) the knight getting around to getting his rocks off. Peasants are expendable - the knight and princess are what matters. Mario is merely a sadistic frustrated twist on this - he rescues the princess repeatedly but never gets any sexual reward. Mario doesn't let anything get in his way, certainly not the denizens of the Mushroom Kingdom who he routinely murders en route to achieving his goal, because once again the peasants are irrelevant while Knight Mario and Princess Peach are what matters. It's even worse, because the peasants are redefined as "monsters" since they have the audacity to attempt to slow down the monomaniacal Mario for one millisecond.

What's even more disturbing is that geeks and nerds in particular are drawn to this kind of virtual fantasy - geeks and nerds being partly defined especially in prior times as having a poor physique of one kind or other (weak or fat). So human beings with poor physiques love playing as the buff knight who claims a high-class (literally) sexual prize through mostly physical prowess - they have no problem redefining peasants as monsters and then murdering those peasants in order to get better at murdering so that finally the end boss can be murdered and the sexual prize claimed. What the peasants think of being demonized and murdered in order for a sociopathic prick calling himself a "hero" to get his rocks off in a royal vagina is never considered - there's no purpose in considering it.

Those of us who have been pointing this and similar things out for many years are acutely aware that pointing it out doesn't matter, or at least it matters to the equivalent of throwing a stone in an ocean. Gamers would much rather ignore reality and proclaim their moral and intellectual superiority to the "Christian fanatics" saying "Dungeons and Dragons is satanic", Jack Thompson and his "murder simulators", and Anita Sarkeesian and her feminist buffoonery.

Why be honest with oneself, take criticism to heart, and make improvements to oneself when one can hoist up buffoons and proclaim them as WHAT MATTERS in gaming criticism? Why take the good, noble, strong route - you know, the route that supposedly *knights* routinely take when one can take the lazy, self-righteous, pathetic, back-handed, sad route of elevating buffoons?

 

[keinsignal]

It's not the point that its a wacky game, the point is that it made the op uncomfortable to suddenly have to kill her teammate for a kiss from a girl when she decided to identify her character as female also, which she could do since they are fully armored. And the reason this thread pisses me off is because so many of the responses are just shit heads passive aggressively insulting her and her not liking that part. If you don't agree with her then just say you don't agree, don't fucken insult the op or try and justify it since its silly, that's a shitty defense.

Yeah, the hostility is what I fail to understand. Mind you, it's not *surprising*. It is apparently to be assumed that when a woman says anything critical of a video game she's going to be called crazy, ignorant, shrill, overreacting, humorless, etcetera. I just can't relate to it. All that's being asked for here is that people, you know, *think* about this stuff sometimes (as opposed to, as the quote goes, "merely rearranging your prejudices".) This is not something that ought to invite outrage.

The larger point is the assumption built into so many games that the player is a straight male who is cool with the idea of treating women as prizes to be won... That this arrested-development archetype is the "default gamer", and no you don't get to change the settings. I'm happy to have more people challenging that idea, and frankly I'd be overjoyed to have more game developers thinking this stuff through and figuring out creative ways to be welcoming to all players (and by creative I mean don't do that stupid thing where you just swap the "knight" and "princess" characters and call it a day. I am looking at you, Super Meat Boy). Or, I guess they could just come out and admit that women are not, in fact, invited into the clubhouse and try to defend that position. I'll be over here with the bucket of popcorn.

I'm actually willing to give Castle Crashers a partial pass inasmuch as they're just goofing around with a well-worn trope... I wouldn't call it satire, but it certainly qualifies as over-the-top humor - it's intentionally stupid, so any message it sends can, I suppose, be treated as equally stupid. Story-wise, it doesn't want or pretend to be anything but a dumb, unquestioning repetition of cliché, lacquered over with a generous coating of anything-goes random wacky BS. But rather than falling back on intentional idiocy as a defense, I think a much more interesting conversation comes out of asking "how could this have been done *smart*?"

 

[Sigmund Av Volsung]

I mean, it's already a pretty silly game in a pretty silly world.

I don't think that anything there is supposed to be taken seriously, like the Panda knights or the Football Hooligan power-up.

If anything, the fight for a damsel in distress could be satirical, and since it's a game that it is intended to play with friends, it would be rather appropiate to end it with a fight to the death. Though if the prize was a hat, it'd have been more funnier(or at least, PC-specific).

 

[Asita]

I can also see people's points about the game not being deep, but I wasn't expecting (or even wanting) anything deep, honestly. I was just expecting the game to not trivialize women. That's not about depth or a good plot, that's about basic common sense. That should be a given.

Take a look at the rest of the game. The story and characters are sparse to the point that the latter are easily interchangeable with one another. Know those barbarians you beat in the first level? You can switch out your knight for them. You can also switch the knight for an alien, a bear, and a demon, among other things...and it doesn't affect anything other than your character's special attack. The characters are all trivial. It's a game built not on story, not on characters, but on combat and crass humor (One of the levels literally has a running gag of animals being so scared as to have explosive diarrhea...which even jet propels one of them). The kidnapping of the court ladies is an excuse plot and the kiss reward is an excuse for a pvp element. That's about the long and short of it.

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

you are overthinking it WAY too much, i could just as easily argue the game reduces men to nothing but violent cavemen who love nothing but smack everything senseless

 

[El Luck]

well shit whatever you do, don't play Battle Block Theatre, you can push cats in to water. Would hate for you to go on another pointless tirade.

Dude, don't be a prick, how would you feel if after beating the last boss in gears of war you suddenly had a scene with Dom and Marco fucking each other in the butt?

What the fuck is wrong with you people? She encountered a situation that kind of came out of no where and made her uncomfortable and you shitheads are just pilling crap on her? WHY!?

You don't even seem to try and understand what is bugging her about this, you just assume she wants to take away your videogames.

Ok firstly, Yup I was being a prick, of that there ain't any doubt and I do feel like a bit of a douche for doing that. But this is my reaction to yet another thread like this.

Secondly, that scene would be completely out of place and I would find it awesome just because its in a Gears of War game.

Lastly you make the assumption on my part that my problem with this is the whole "evul woman coming to take away the vidja gaimes" thing. Nope. Granted that from my response to the OP, that assumption is fair game.

My problem with this entire thing is based on the OPs overreaction and baseless assumption. The overreaction was to a stupid tropey as fuck scene in an arcade style game which was so tropey and stupid and was just a set up for a bit of dumb pvp action between you and the people your playing with, and the baseless assumption was that the game is telling you that your character is a man, when the game at no point states that your character has a gender, the only thing the playable characters have is a title, and that's it. the only thing that even points to a gender is on the community created wiki.

There, I've explained in detail what I think, and to the OP I apologise for being a dick with my initial response. Hopefully you find a way to get over said problem and continue to enjoy what is one hell of a fun game.

 

[Dragon Zero]

To be honest, I'd mostly forgotten about that aspect of the game. As with most games, I play it alone because I'm a very very sad man. I do remember playing online I'd usually become outclassed, so I wouldn't even bother fighting back.

I never really thought about giving my characters traits since other than the character model itself and magic use they are almost indistinguishable. I also do find it rather interesting that most of the playable character models are rather gender neutral-ish so you could argue that they are one sex or another, some better than others. One thing you might also consider is that maybe the princesses themselves are the ones demanding the action, I know its a stretch but that's just the way I see it. Finally a kiss just could be a kiss it doesn't necessarily mean other amorous feelings are involved. Again that could just be me thinking that since I'm rather... well I guess the term could be "sexless" if a bit crass.

In any case I don't really feel the same way however I don't think its my place to tell you or anyone that you're wrong to think and feel the way you do about such matters. I would strongly recommend that you maybe give it another shot as it is a very good game, but again it's all up to you. Also sorry if this post is somewhat low quality, the written word is not my strong suit.

 

[Drizzitdude]

Its just another game abotu dudes rescuing a princess. There is no harmful gender-inequality or sexual message here, questioning it like asking why Mario and Link try to rescue their respective princesses and why your forced into their journey. It is meant to be a fun little co-op game to play with your friends, just have fun with it

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

Its just another game abotu dudes rescuing a princess. There is no harmful gender-inequality or sexual message here, questioning it like asking why Mario and Link try to rescue their respective princesses and why your forced into their journey. It is meant to be a fun little co-op game to play with your friends, just have fun with it

and to think a certain internet person made a video about why mario and link rescuing their princesses was all kinds of wrong, but well i guess thats a story for another day kids! people will complain about me bringing HER again

i do agree with you, people should stop assuming that, just because something offends you, its the most terrible thing ever

 

[the December King]

I'm sorry that this bothered you!

For me, there was a similar jolt, at least in principle, in Saint's Row 2. I was having so much fun doing silly things like insurance fraud and rag dolling around the city, racing taxis full of clients to destinations and spraying poop, that when I eventually did come back to the plot as a gang boss murderer, it was a sobering and jarring experience. I had it in my head that I was a goofy weird clown that could wander the city jigging in front of the elderly and jumping from rooftops as I pleased.

Not a deal breaker, mid you, I was just not playing so necessarily cold-blooded up to those moments, you know? Then, bam, I'm murdering personalities in cut scenes in gruesome ways.

My point is that when I have had an image of how my game was going, and the game has changed my narrative or surprised me in such a way that I was left feeling betrayed, I was upset, too.

 

[Chaos Isaac]

This is hilarious.
I'm just so amused that I can't even snark at this.

 

[Frankster]

I haven't played the game in question so take my view with a generous helping of salt:

-The concept of having to fight your team mate who you been fighting back to back with for an entire game isn't something new in arcade style beat em ups, I remember most notably this being the case in the first streets of rage, to give an example different to Double Dragon.
In that game the players fought over dissenting opinions on whether to accept Mr Xs offer of joining him, and I don't see the whole "knights fighting over princess" scenario to be that different in that it works in this context and matches the theme, that's what knights at their most extreme stereotypical white knight behavior do: fight over damsels between each other after the obvious enemies have been dealt with.

-Guys dieing and killing each other over the reward of a maiden (whose own desires are completely ignored) is a trope that is in line with the whole knights and chivalry schtick and resonates way beyond it too.
Personally this has always bothered me a bit in media (there's a recent film I saw, the Jason and golden fleece film? well in that one the hero totally forgets about his comrade in arms who fought with him and died in horrible ways to choose to at the end of the film to ONLY resurrect the female character, because that's all that mattered and the other guys could just go rot in hades for all eternity), not least due to implications you're less of a man for not wanting to compete with others over the fairer sex but this is something that's juat part of our culture.

Shame that it all resulted in ruining your enjoyment of a game you were having a good time with, and that's all I think I have to say about the topic.

 

[Maximum Bert]

Didn't the original Double Dragon do this first?

Yeah I think so at least it was the first game I remember doing it totally took me and a friend by surpise we were only young so it was just a case of ok awesome now we get to fight each other rather than any analyzing as to why or whether it was appropriate.

I havent played Castle Crashers but I wouldnt be surprised if its inclusion was a nod to double dragon in some way.

I feel no need to defend what is going on or condemn it its just what it is as for being upset because you projected a wrong image onto a character well thats kinda your own fault OP you assumed wrong.

I find it amusing that people are getting upset about things like this now and dont bat an eye at violence anymore (never had a problem with violence in games either really) it used to be what!? you KILL all these people/things? games are destroying everyone now its ok par for the course (except those who still want to use it for scapegoating and those to stupid or lazy to think for themselves)but someone kisses someone! and the sky falls in for some people.

You can get upset about whatever you want OP I suspect most others wont be bothered in the slightest by this. I have been upset about things others dont care about as well like the slight change in move list from SC to SC2 removing my 2 favourite moves in the game (well removing one and changing the other to a less cool version).