2191: On the Objectification of Waifus, and Why Anita Sarkeesian is Wrong (Again)

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The yawning portal of despair that is Anita Sarkeesian’s mouth once again creaked open earlier today, and as usual a stream of ill-informed rhetoric belched forth, bringing pain and misery to all within earshot. This time around she was mad about arses. She was mad that female characters had nice arses that game developers liked to show off, but she was also mad that male characters had their arses hidden by cloaks if they are Batman.

The above is, of course, a rather sweeping simplification of what she was arguing, but I don’t want to provide an in-depth critique of her latest video, largely because I can’t stomach watching her smug face whining any more. Instead, I want to refute one of the core aspects of her overall argument: the fact that women are objectified in games, and that this is bad.

Actually, no; I’m not going to refute the fact that women are objectified, because they are. And so are men, but I’m not going to focus on that aspect, either; let’s stick to the women. So to speak.

The key point that Sarkeesian perpetually misses when talking about the depiction of women in video games is that the most popular characters — male or female — are pretty much always popular for reasons other than their appearance. We’ll go into some specific examples in a moment, but it’s also important to acknowledge that appearance is important, and that objectification does occur — it’s just not the sole, driving force that Sarkeesian seems to think it is, and it’s frankly rather insulting to everyone for her to suggest that men are only interested in looking at nice arses and nothing else.

Men are, of course, interested in looking at nice arses, and here’s a key point. Objectification and judging by appearance occurs immediately the moment a player is first confronted with a new character — and particularly when the player is offered a selection of characters to choose from. At this point, the character becomes the “face” of the product that is the game, and it’s perfectly natural for someone to gravitate immediately towards someone they like the look of for whatever reason. Depending on the person, this reason may well be that they find the character physically attractive — but it can also be that they find them amusing or relatable, like the way they’re dressed, remind them of someone else, remind them of themselves or any number of reasons.

Importantly, though, whether the player is inclined to stick with that character in the long term is not determined by objectification and their appearance. It’s all to do with personality, character and capability. A character can be the most gorgeous, hottest piece of ass you’ve ever seen, but if they’re boring, they’re not going to hold a player’s interest.

Let’s consider a few examples. These are based on my personal experiences with these characters, and anecdotal evidence of what I have seen others saying about them.

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This is Lightning from Final Fantasy XIII. She’s an extremely attractive, striking character, but in an understated rather than self-consciously sexy way. She’s slim but toned, wears a short skirt, has pleasingly tousled hair, has perpetually pouted, parted and moist lips, and wears sexy boots.

She’s also one of the most widely disliked characters in the entire Final Fantasy series thanks to being seen as “boring”. This is partly due to her single-minded nature, partly due to the rather monotone delivery by voice actor Ali Hillis and partly due to the fact that, as the main player-protagonist character in the game, she was pretty obviously kept as a bit of a “blank slate” for the player to interpret and identify with as they saw fit.

I personally don’t think she’s all that bad, but there are far more interesting characters in Final Fantasy XIII. Lightning does, however, act as a suitable proxy for the player to interact with the world and its inhabitants, and in that respect she’s a successful game protagonist. I just don’t see many people declaring her as a “waifu”.

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This is Neptune and Nepgear from the Neptunia series. They are very popular “waifu” choices, but you’ll note that they both err rather on the side of “cute” rather than “sexy”, leaving aside their plugsuit-style HDD/goddess forms seen in the background of the image above. Actually, that raises an interesting point: those who proudly declare Neptune or Nepgear as a favourite character or “waifu” tend to do so with their human incarnations in mind, not the sexed-up HDD versions.

Why are Neptune and Nepgear popular then? Because they have strong personalities, and are interesting characters. Neptune is one of the most incompetent RPG protagonists the genre has ever seen, although her scatterbrained nature acts as an eminently suitable metaphor for the chaotic way most people play RPGs — putting the world on hold to go and grind out some sidequests — while Nepgear is the perfect foil to her sister, being nice, polite, quiet, intelligent and, frankly, a bit of a doormat to everyone around her.

While I won’t deny that there are people out there who want to sexualise these two (there’s plenty of Rule 34 artwork out there to confirm that) it’s also true that the vast majority of Neptunia fans who pick a favourite — whether it’s Neptune, Nepgear or any of the other main cast members — are doing so not on the basis of which one they want to fuck the most, as Sarkeesian suggests, but rather the one that they simply enjoy spending time with the most.

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Here are the various incarnations of Lara Croft from the Tomb Raider series over the years. While Lara tends not to inspire the same sort of fanatical “my waifu!” declarations that female protagonists of Japanese games — and the reasons for that are a whole other matter worth discussing another time — she’s still a popular character, and not because she’s sexy.

Oh, sure, her tiny shorts and enormous rack made for some striking box art back when the original Tomb Raider came out, but if there was no substance to her, she wouldn’t have been able to hold down a series for so long. A series that has been “rebooted” twice, yes, but a series in which she has remained a fairly consistent character, all told: a strong, confident, somewhat posh British woman with a plummy accent, a penchant for gunplay and acrobatics, and a desire to constantly challenge herself.

Moreover, she manages to be a female character that doesn’t alienate anyone: she’s not “girly” in an exaggerated manner, but nor is she overly masculine or aggressive. She manages to occupy a somewhat understated middle ground similar to what Lightning’s creator Toriyama was presumably going for, only with arguably slightly better results. In other words, she has appeal elements designed for lots of different people and, despite her “sexiness quotient” being toned down a bit over the years, particularly in the most recent games, she’s still a good-looking lady. But, importantly, that’s not why people like her.

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Finally for now — I could happily go on with this all day — here is Totori, Rorona and Meruru from the Atelier Arland series. All pretty young things, I’m sure you’ll agree, and all clearly designed to initially draw the player in with their attractiveness — or, perhaps more accurately, cuteness, much like Neptune and Nepgear.

But, again, anyone who proudly declares any one of these girls as their “waifu”, or just as a favourite character, is not doing so because they want to fuck them. No; they’re doing so because they like Rorona’s optimistic but clumsy nature; Totori’s inherent sweetness; Meruru’s lively, bubbly personality. Again, it’s a case of wanting a “relationship” of sorts with these characters — of wanting to hang out with them as people, rather than objectifying them as something to jack off to.

Objectification and aesthetics play an important role in determining our initial attraction to something. But a relationship built purely on physical attraction and nothing deeper is a relationship that will not last long — and a relationship that will be forgotten shortly after it has ended. This is not what modern gamers are looking for — and it is not what the vast majority of modern games are providing.

Men are complicated creatures. No, people are complicated creatures. To boil down everyone’s thinking to “everyone judges everything by appearance” is both reductive and unhelpful. And yet this is exactly what Sarkeesian is doing — just another reason she continues to lose credibility with pretty much everything she says.

1492: The Alchemist of Arland, Reprise

I’ve been enjoying Atelier Rorona for the past few days, so I thought I’d talk a little about what I like about it. I know that Atelier Rorona isn’t the best of the three …of Arland games on PS3, but my completionist nature (from a narrative perspective, anyway) insists that I play it thoroughly first before moving on to the supposedly superior Atelier Totori and Atelier Meruru. And while I was originally intending to wait for the revamped version of Atelier Rorona before I played it, there’s still no confirmation one way or the other of whether it’s coming to the West. I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t, but either way, I decided I couldn’t wait any longer. I started playing it a while back — June of last year, in fact — but only got about ten hours in due to a combination of Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory, Time and Eternity and Tales of Xillia. Now, no more interruptions!

So what the hell is Atelier Rorona and why should you care? Well, it’s… I guess it’s an RPG? It certainly has all the trappings of a typical RPG — hit points, experience points, levels, skills — but it’s not at all your usual “band of plucky heroes saves the world” affair. No, instead it’s a rather smaller-scale affair in which you play a young girl called Rorona who is tasked with saving the alchemy workshop in which she works by fulfilling a series of increasingly unreasonable requests. These all come from Meredith Alcock, the head of the Ministry of Arland, who is keen to stamp out alchemy in favour of industrialisation for his own, presumably greedy reasons. Failure to meet the requirements of the assignments brings your game to a premature end; successfully completing them means you’re immediately presented with another one until you reach the conclusion of the game.

Amid all these assignments are numerous visual novel-style narrative paths that are woven throughout the course of the game, and which you can advance by improving your relationships with various characters by performing additional tasks for them. There are numerous endings to the game, and it’s designed to be replayed several times. I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to attempt to play as much of Rorona as possible before moving on to Totori, or if I’m going to cycle around Rorona, Totori and Meruru several times in sequence. Either way, I’m presently enjoying the experience enough to want to try and see as many of the endings as possible.

It’s not necessarily the narrative that is the biggest draw in Atelier Rorona though. No, this being a Gust game, the emphasis is very much on an in-depth crafting system, which is excellent yet enjoyably distinct from that seen in Atelier’s stablemate Ar Tonelico. In Ar Tonelico, crafting was a means of seeing various interactions between the characters and getting to know them a little better — plus getting some great items out of the experience in the process. In Atelier, meanwhile, the crafting system is the core of the game: it’s the way you complete most of the assignments in the game, and the solution to most of the quests you’re presented with to earn money or improve your relationship with other characters.

The reason it’s so interesting is because it’s a lot deeper than simpler systems seen in other games that require you to do nothing more than combine specific items to get a brand new item. In Atelier Rorona, you have to take the quality of your ingredients into account — and things like organic ingredients spoil over time — as well as the various “traits” they have attached to them. In many cases, these are nothing more than flavour — if you make a metal ingot that is “stinky” it doesn’t affect the stats of any items you subsequently create using it, for example — but in others you can do things like boost the base effect of a healing or attack item, improve the stats on equipment and improve its quality beyond that which its component items would normally provide.

There’s a lot of number-crunching involved to optimise your alchemy, and you can’t always count on having perfect ingredients available, so sometimes you’ll have to improvise somewhat. The ability to do this is reflected by some ingredient items for recipes being a generic category rather than a specific item. For example, when making a “Spring Cup” item that contains liquid, the exact liquid you put in there is up to you — it could be water, it could be tree sap, or something altogether more unpleasant. The items you choose to put in there will affect the final quality of the item, and experimentation is often very rewarding.

Key to doing well in Atelier Rorona is managing your time effectively, because everything you do causes the in-game clock to tick away, counting down towards each new deadline. Whether you’re crafting something or going out into the field to gather ingredients and fight monsters, everything takes time, so if you want to optimise how you’re playing the game — which is presumably important when going for some of the endings — you’ll need to plan your time well. Probably better than I’m doing right now, but I’m fine with just seeing which ending I get first time, then specifically attempting to pursue one or more of the others on a subsequent playthrough.

If the other two …of Arland games are as enjoyable as Atelier Rorona I can see myself spending a hefty amount of time on this series. It helps that Rorona has an amazing soundtrack — I shouldn’t expect anything less from Gust after Ar Tonelico’s magnificence in that regard — but the gameplay is rock-solid too. I’m looking forward to crafting a whole bunch more pies, bombs and mysterious liquids over the next few weeks, and I don’t doubt I’ll report further on my progress as I continue.

1252: The Alchemist of Arland

Now Ar Tonelico is over and done with, I’ve been able to start up some other games without guilt. Specifically, I made a start on Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory today, which I’ll talk about in more detail in a day or two, as well as Atelier Rorona: The Alchemist of Arland.

This is my first encounter with the Atelier series. I do, in fact, own all three PS2 games (known as Atelier Iris) and all three PS3 Arland games (Atelier Rorona, Atelier Totori and Atelier Meruru) plus the first entry in the new Dusk series (Atelier Ayesha), but this is my first time playing them — they’re all games that I picked up when I saw good deals a while back, and subsequently added them to my stack of Stuff I’d Like to Play at Some Indefinite Point in the Future.

From what I understand, each “subseries” in the Atelier franchise as a whole does things markedly differently. The PS2 games, from what I can make out, appear to be rather more conventional JRPGs with a lot of game mechanics brought across from the Ar Tonelico series — no bad thing. The PS3 games, meanwhile, if Atelier Rorona is anything to go by, are an interesting twist — and not at all what I expected.

In Atelier Rorona, you play the titular heroine, a young girl with a bit of a self-confidence problem. Rorona is currently employed in an alchemy workshop as a means of paying off a debt to the alchemist Astrid. Rorona is a lovely girl, but unfortunately Astrid is not particularly popular, and as such the kingdom of Arland is doing its level best to get her workshop shut down so factories can be built on its location. It’s up to you to make sure that doesn’t happen.

On the surface, Atelier Rorona resembles a fairly straightforward JRPG. You have big-eyed anime characters who chat to each other at great length via the medium of 2D emote portraits, text and voice acting. You have hit points, experience and levels. You have “dungeons”. But it’s not a JRPG. No, in fact, it’s actually more of a strategy/management game, in which the most important thing is not pushing through the story or powerlevelling your characters, but instead making careful — very careful — use of your time.

The flow of gameplay in Atelier Rorona is pretty straightforward. Roughly every three months or so of in-game time, you’re given an assignment by the kingdom of Arland; meet the deadline and everything’s fine, but fail to meet the requirements and your alchemy workshop will be shut down, prompting an immediate Game Over. The assignments generally require you to turn in items of one or more different types, with your overall evaluation score for the assignment as a whole being calculated on a combination of the number of items you submitted in total, their quality, and the variety of different types of item you submitted.

Completing assignments isn’t the only thing you have to do, though. No, as well as ensuring that your workshop survives for the next three months, you also have to try and improve its dreadful reputation by taking on smaller-scale quests for the local populace, and improve your relationship with your friends by taking on quests for them. And in the meantime, you need ingredients, of course, so you’ll need to spend a few days every so often going on a jaunt into the forest/ruins/mines to go and collect things. And in order to protect themselves on said jaunts, your party needs equipment, of course, which means you need to synthesise the raw materials needed then take them to the friendly local blacksmith to forge them into something new.

It’s initially overwhelming, but once you get into the groove of prioritising what you need to do vs. what you want to do, it’s a lot of fun.

What I find particularly interesting is that while it’s clearly a strategy game, its approach to things is very different to the high level of abstraction found in Western games. Were this a Western-developed game based on the same premise, you’d be spending a lot of time in abstract menus, dragging icons around and that sort of thing. Combat would perhaps be resolved automatically. There’s nothing wrong with that approach, of course; it’s just a little too dry for my tastes. Which is why I appreciate the amount of time and effort which Gust has made to infuse Atelier Rorona’s tiny world with a great deal of character.

In order to do various things, you need to wander around town and visit people. In the process, you’ll stumble across things happening on various occasions, with further events happening according to your friendship level with your various party members. We get a strong feeling of who Rorona is and how she relates to the people around her, not to mention a strong sense of unfolding narrative, but the core gameplay is straight up hardcore strategy/management.

It’s actively stressful to play, but enjoyable in the process; there’s just enough light relief with the characters and story sequences to keep things interesting. I’m already very much enamoured with the Rorona’s rather tsundere best friend Cordelia, who hasn’t explicitly said so yet, but clearly has a big chip on her shoulder about her short stature. I’m looking forward to the inevitable explosion about that at some point, but in the meantime I have a batch of incense to make that just won’t wait…