#oneaday Day 88: No Progress

On my old #oneaday blog, I posted more articles than I'd like somewhat upset and frustrated at the state of the modern games press. And, it seems, we haven't gone anywhere since that time. If anything, things are getting worse.

Eurogamer recently published its review of Koei Tecmo's new fighting game Dead or Alive 6. As anyone who has been gaming for a while will know, Dead or Alive is a series that has always proudly, unashamedly been about being heavily stylised, delightfully fluid, over the top ridiculous and sexy. It's long had a significant cast of female characters, each of whom have a good amount of characterisation, backstory and unique personality traits, but of course, the one thing that everyone has wanted to focus on ever since the series' inception is the jiggly boob physics.

Right from early Dead or Alive games, there was a setting in the menu to alter boob physics from "vaguely realistic within the constraints of the technology" to "absolutely, hilariously ridiculous". It has always been part of the series. And it has always been nothing more than a bit of fun, complementing the feeling of "sexiness" that the series has always deliberately sought out with both its male and its female characters.

So of course, in Eurogamer's review, this is a massive problem that makes the game "embarrassing" to play, "icky", "grim" and other such childish words. This, of course, completely fails to take into account the fact that this is what fans of the series have come to expect, even demand from Dead or Alive at this point. And you know what? It's fine! It's absolutely fine.

The usual argument against this sort of thing — it happens to Senran Kagura as well — is that it's creepy, borderline pornography. However, this is a stupid argument; pretty much anyone who is in a position to play Dead or Alive or Senran Kagura is doubtless also in a position to be able to get on the Internet, where there is a literally limitless amount of porn through which you can indulge your carnal fantasies. Including, should you so desire, porn of video game characters. Even the ones you might think there really shouldn't be porn of. Yes, even that one.

In other words, someone buying Dead or Alive is doing so because they like Dead or Alive. They like the way it plays. They like its unique mechanics, such as the multi-level stages with destructible scenery and the countering system. They like the cinematic presentation. They like the characters. They like the competitive scene. Hell, some people might even like the complicated, poorly told and largely unfathomable story, never an especially strong point of fighting games but an area in which Team Ninja has at least always made an effort.

I know that if I buy Dead or Alive 6 — and I might well do that, since it's a fighting game series I've always had a good time with without feeling overwhelmed by complicated mechanics — I will be doing so because of all of these reasons. Not because I want to crack one off over Kasumi's thighs, as glorious as they are.

I'm disappointed that this is still where we're are. We've made no progress since all this started at the start of the decade, and in many ways things have become far, far worse. Sites that I once used to respect and go to for my daily gaming news have completely fallen out of my rotation because I simply can't respect the moral grandstanding they churn out on a daily basis.

I wouldn't mind if they acknowledged these "problematic" games in their entirety. But inevitably when you get a review that opens by calling a game "embarrassing", you can count on the reviewer not having engaged with it on anything other than the most superficial of levels. And so, knowing that, I cannot take anything else that writer writes seriously — moreover, despite publications being made up of individual writers rather than a homogeneous mass, I cannot take that publication seriously, either, because that article presumably (hopefully) went through an editorial process at some point. (And if it didn't, even less reason to respect that publication!)

Right. That's enough of that for now, I don't want to get too hung up on this, but I did want to acknowledge it. And, with that in mind, I also wanted to thank you for, through your kind contributions, continuing to support MoeGamer and my work to engage with these games as intended.

Let's have a good day.