How come games with a main female protagonist are almost always awful...

How come games with a main female protagonist are almost always awful? I mean titles where the lead character is written into the script as female, not ones where you're free to create your own character.

They all seem like they fill the same generic, boring, devoid of personality role, because there's only a few "safe" ways to write a female lead that are considered acceptable. They're either the woman scorned, and out for revenge for one reason or another, or the protector, who has a duty to keep someone or something safe even if they never asked for it.

>They're either the woman scorned, and out for revenge for one reason or another, or the protector, who has a duty to keep someone or something safe even if they never asked for it.

sounds like many male protags.

>devoid of personality
sounds like nearly all protags period

The only such game I remember is Beyond Good and Evil.

Probably the same as whatever reason most movies, TV shows, books, comics, anime/manga and pretty much all media with female protags (plus stuff like stand-up comedy) tends to be awful.

There are exceptions of course in all of those fields. But not many.

People are afraid of drawing too many parallels with reality when it comes to measuring the strength of the strongest male personalities against the strongest females, because the females tends to be comparatively unimpressive. If writers weren't afraid to write flawed female leads we might not have as much of a problem.

They're all trying to become like Metroid.

CDProjekt made the best female characters ever written, period.

They're badass because they act like women of their time and all that comes with it, instead of hamfisted masculine "badassness" that some writers have been pushing lately. Philippa Eilhart is a great example of a great female character who manages to be a absolute boss while relying on feminine traits. She knows she's in a world dominated by men, and uses her charm and skill to seduce and manipulate people to do her work. If shit hits the fan, she starts using her magic as a last resort.
It's why Ripley is always hailed as the best female protag; she's not strong, fast or that particularly smart. She's the very anti-thesis of the standard male protag of the 80s, and she uses her cunning and survival instinct to carry her through the movies.

And that's why Bioware sucks. They try to make female characters behave like Arnold instead of Philippa because "muh strong womyn" trope, when they could be using a character's gender and its femininity or masculinity to strenghten them.

It's shit like this post that make me really hate Witcher fans.

I want a story where a female uses her femininity and guile to get stuff done. The whole "male with tits" approach has been done to death

>Confirmed FOTM character
Feels bad man

>CDProjekt made the best female characters ever written, period.

not sure about that, but everything is spot on. It's nice to see one modern AAA dev do it right.

Pisses me off senpai. Oboro really was a diamond in the rough.

I love how all the characters people actually like weren't in the original draft.

Yes, you basically just answered your own question. It's not that women are boring, it's the writing that sucks because the writers need to avoid too many landmines.

There was an experiment some time ago where a director secretly altered a script by switching all female characters to male and vice versa. The result was that all the actress roles were ridiculously fun loving people, while the actors were nothing more than complaining dudebros.
I failed googling the article, if its still up...

*everything else

She's a excellent character, and I think the devs made great female characters overall.

Feel free to have a other opinion, it's not like I'm offended.

Hey man, Tomb Raider, Alice and Transistor are good games.

It's why Ripley is always hailed as the best female protag; she's not strong, fast or that particularly smart. She's the very anti-thesis of the standard male protag of the 80s, and she uses her cunning and survival instinct to carry her through the movies

You're an idiot. She basically becomes the standard 80s action hero in the last act of Aliens

I think the devs themselves are very talented. The problem with Fates, I think, was the writer they outsourced the script to.

>Kids those days will never know the joys of good old Tomb Raiders
>Instead they associate the title with a whinny bitch

Would love to see all the shit Nu-Lara goes through but with Old-Lara instead.

>Missing the point this hard
Ripley is a perfect evolution of a character, because she starts as literal chick, turns into team mom, then goes badass and in the end, she's as dangerous as the monster she's fighting with. This is at least the one good thing entire Alien franchise did as a whole.

And she's faaaar away from standar 80s action hero, but how could you know, if you associate them with Arnie and Sly from the tail end of the decade.

It would be actually pretty funny. Just try to imagine her absolute lack of reaction about gunning down bunch of dudes or facing a fucking undead demon.
Expedition like every other, just without micro uzis.

>You're an idiot. She basically becomes the standard 80s action hero in the last act of Aliens
Which is why Aliens is a shitty action schlock movie

She would figure out how to get rid of Himiko in first 30 minutes and do so in next 15.
That would be the shortest TR ever.

Unless we are talking about Rise.
Then she would ignore all those people and go directly to that fucking glacier then all the clues point as a ruins of the city, rather than chasing around without any real aim.
Two hours later, game finished, Source secured and put in her treasure vault back home.

Or the scene where Nu-Lara gets impaled by a rusty bar or something in the first reboot. Would be interesting to see her reaction, if she had any.

In a way, Aliens is the epitome of how fucking awful a sequel can be
>Done by some random, unknown hack that just made his debute and is now given craft work by the studio
>Turns tense Freudian horror into gung-ho shooting gallery with badass marines and even more badass female protag
>"Hey guys, remember how there was one monster and it was super scary? Imagine if there was entire army of them!"
>Rum-dum-dum-dum-dum, military music
>Let's add children that need protection!
>And love story!
Seriously, I'm still amazed this film turned into a success

Stabilise the rebar, open med-kid, sew it together, patch it up, give it a day of rest/shrug it off with painkillers, continue going for goodies.

>generic, boring, devoid of personality

You described most women. It's all about the realism these days.

I'd really like to see a female lead who makes use of traditionally feminine strengths, rather than just being a mindlessly violent and emotionless killer. What they call being a "strong female character" these days is just acting like a male character.

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Stop playing western games.

>Implying she would use such stupid escape route
>Implying she would get imapled in the first place due to most stupid way of trying to escape
>Implying Lara was such a whinny brat
16 year old Lara was more competent than Nu-Lara is after two big adventures.

...

It's fine, you can just wave your tits around to get what you want anyway.

Because women don't have the mentality, strength or personalities for standard combat roles, hence why any game with a female lead either feels weird because they have a normal woman personality but are slaughtering hordes of soldiers, or they feel bland because they just have a man's personality in a woman's body.

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Thanks user, it just hit me like a freight train. Aliens ruined forever

Which game by CDProject has a female protagonist?

Thank God that Isolation didn't follow the Aliens chain of LET'S SHOOT ALL THE XENOS like every other Alien game.

It's a terrible sequel, but it's a excellent action movie.

>What they call being a "strong female character" these days is just acting like a male character.

Reminds me an awful lot of Bioware.

Aliens is an amazing action schlock movie, one of the best ever made. I mean yeah, it ruined the xenos forever but it's not like you can't watch the original again anyway.

Depends entirely on the setting though.

>her charm and skill to seduce and manipulate people to do her work
Sounds shitty

>what is no one lives forever

I like the ones which start as brave heroines out to save the world, but in the end turn into cock breathing, semen swallowing, orc breeding cumrags.

But evil never dies!~

It's hard to write a good female.

But i think we all can agree she needs to be cute and have other female traits and not just another man protag. Thats what makes it a good FEMALE protagonist.

Is the picture in the op from Assassin’s Creed?

>she needs to be cute
weeb detected

So Velvet?

>rio
>meat toilet
>semen dancer

Wut

Yes

All VIDEO GAME protages are devoid of character your supposed to fill them with your character.
Want to see cool characters to cool feats? Go watch some anime

Which one?

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Life is strange
Checkmate OP.

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Or play a character action game

I have a problem with this argument about Guybrush because Guybrush is a parody of a very specific type of male character. He's everything a main protagonist of a pirate story should NOT be. He's a lanky dork, basically. That's why it works.

Name
Title
Occupation

>Which is why Aliens is a shitty action schlock movie

Which has balls the size of the sun. You're a fucking idiot indeed.

>main female protagonist are almost always awful?

What is Perfect Dark

What is the Tomb Raider Franchise

What is Beyond Good and Evil

What is Resident Evil

What is Silent Hill 3


Etc. There are lots of games with female protagonists that are good

I really liked them doing it in 2013. It added a 3d dimension to the character a background etc etc. But if you are gonna do her transition from a normal spooked out archaeologist to the ultimate badass. Eventually she has to actually become rhe fucking badass. They wanted to show her progression amd forgot to progress.

>It's hard to write a good female.
I guess the only way to achieve that is by getting a 'good' female writer. Unfortunately most of the time a female writer would immediately turn the character into Mary Sue with designated chads, I dunno...

but that's Lune, not Rio.

How come games with a main male protagonist are almost always awful? I mean titles where the lead character is written into the script as male, not ones where you're free to create your own character.
They all seem like they fill the same generic, boring, devoid of personality role, because there's only a few "safe" ways to write a male lead that are considered acceptable. They're either the gruff "badass", and out for revenge for one reason or another, or the protector, who has a duty to keep someone or something safe even if they never asked for it.

Not really a protagonist, but I like to mention James Kidd is one of the most memorable female characters in a video game with a pretty damn unique character development.

Because 90% of women are parasites.

Philippa Eilhart is a shitty woman, that's the point. She burned 4 men, 3 countries and at least 8 of her own friends.

>Mary Sue with designated chads

What's wrong with this? Males are written like that too.

Lichdom battlemage is notable, the female was written by a female, the male by a male.
The sorcesses is this snide cackling bitch, while the sorcerer is sombre and duty driven.

Because most writers for video games are hacks

Wonder if the fact she poses as a man for most of her screen time has anything to do with it

>in the last act of Aliens

Alien is damn good kino
Aliens is a damn good movie

Are you implying one can't alter their name?

Women for the most part have different tastes than we do. While men prefer a lot of action and sex in their games and movies, women prefer lots of story and drama, that's why most anons here can't stand games like Gone Home and Her Story.

Then there's games like FF7 and Legend of Zelda that are in between resulting in both men and women alike enjoying them

This is true. If they're good writers they won't be writing for video games.

yet you never see them being considered as good characters.

name of the game?

Ofcourse it's wrong. Are assuming Gary Stu is alright?

because the writers try too hard to make it about the MC being a woman, instead of writing a decent character who just so happens to be a female

Nah women prefer interpersonal drama much more than story. They enjoy actions a lot too, provided it's "clean" fun, vibrant and exciting.

Open your eyes, it's in the pic.

Witcher won awards with a Gary Stu protagonist.

these

Where? I can't see it.

Ripley was good because she wasn't either masculine or feminine. None of the crew were in fact, you could have replaced any one of them with the opposite gender and it still works (which is what the script was in the first place - there's a practical scriptwriting reason on top of the air of cold formality why they all call each other by their second name).

>no one lives forever

There's the person who know what's up.

usually when Gary Stufkosky comes into play, I imagine he much younger

Stop staring at the tits

So what's it have to do with female protagonist if she's not a protagonist, and doesn't have the qualities you'd want in one.

I have a problem with it as it works on the assumption that people would automatically be upset and unable to accept a Galbrush. Nobody has tried anything like that with a female protagonist in a game.

I thought that was kind of the point though? These are prequels, right? In which case, it makes sense that she's a stupid idiotic 20 something woman in the prequels, and some cold motherfucker who ices shit without a hint of reaction in the older games, which take place after many adventures where the whole thing just becomes a day job.

The fact that he was old but powerful and popular made him even more Gary Stu.

Because video game writers are fucking hacks

Kat from Gravity Rush.

She's homeless, smelly, dumb, lives in the sewer and has no friends. She's insecure, socially inept and gullible, does chores and odd jobs for everyone she meets but always gets abused and disrespected by them afterward.

Pretty much the entire series she just wants to hear someone tell her they think she's a decent person, but they never do. Also she used to be queen of the universe but had her memory of that wiped to protect the world from destruction.

The more feminine and sexualized a female character, the worse her game ends up being. You can see this in clear contrast with multiple games. These for example:

>Super Metroid and Metroid Prime
>Samus is barely seen out of her suit, almost never talks, any fanservice is restricted to the end of the game, or not even there at all
>games are some of the finest explorative titles to ever exist, and have aged like fine wine

>Bayonetta, Dragon's Crown, dragon Age,
>MUH SEXY STRONG WOMYN WHO DON'T NEED NO MEN TEE HEE
>all of their games are rancid QTE laden cinematic trash

Really gets the gears turning when you think about it.

>despicable characters can't be likeable

>sounds like many male protag
This is the main problem with western female protagonists. They act manlier than fucking men. Male characters in a female skin.

Not that user but I think you're not exactly sure on the meaning of gary sue/mary sue.

>Nobody has tried anything like that with a female protagonist in a game.

Perhaps not protagonist, but Day of the Tentacle has a similar female character to Galbrush.

They're all a bunch of nerds though.

Not from the looks only, also how she acts, naively or emotionful depending on the situation