Who’s the Sexiest Character in Gaming?

Not to start this post off with a controversial opinion, but I have to be honest: I think underboob is the worst thing ever.

It’s fine if other people like it, of course.  But for me?  It actively makes anything it’s attached to demonstrably worse.  I remember when BlazBlue was first bumping around and it revealed squirrel girl Makoto in her school uniform -- pretty OK, more or less.  But then when her combat form was revealed for her stint in Continuum Shift -- notably, as one of the very first DLC-specific fighters -- she showed off no shortage of underboob.  And I thought, “I’m done with this character.”

It just strikes me as trashy -- and tryhard, while we’re at it.  It’s an unnatural attempt to get a rise out of others, with means that are entirely unnecessary.  Like, we can all agree that breasts of any kind are fine on their own, right?  Why go out of your way to highlight them in such an awkward way?  Or is it just a means to show that the woman in question doesn’t know how to wear clothes?  Either way, I think it’s the worst.  I’m pretty biased, though, thanks to that one time on the night of a full moon.

But let’s not dwell on it.  Let’s talk about sexy characters instead.

On Progression in Games

So how big is your backlog?

I’d like to think that the answer to that varies from one gamer to another, but there are some constants.  Not to open myself up for a heaping helping of Foot in Mouth Stew, but I’d imagine that there’s at least one game that everybody has on the backburner.  Then again, that might be a conservative estimate; with Steam long since established -- along with some pretty generous sales -- maybe plenty of folks are drowning in games.

I’m not in so dire a situation, but there’s a healthy list of games from the past year that I seriously need to get to.  Honestly (and distressingly), there are games from years long since passed that I need to get to -- which by extension means that I need to start over on several games, because they’ve got more dust on them than intact memories.  That makes me wonder if I can be relevant if I talk about games between “recent” and “classic” -- inasmuch as I can be relevant -- but based on my gaming recently, I think I might have figured something out about myself.

Xenoblade Chronicles X: A Double Lariat

Is there anyone reading this that laments the loss of the game’s bust slider?

Just before Xenoblade Chronicles X hit store shelves in the west, there was that controversy over “censorship”, i.e. gamers couldn’t raise or lower the size of their created female characters’ breasts.  The argument, or something like it, was that Nintendo decided that gamers weren’t capable of handling those matters.  Or, if you want to play strawman, they didn’t want to deal with outcries from the “dreaded” SJWs.  It was either that, or they caved into demands as part of an overly-PC culture, even if it meant sacrificing artistic merit.

I think that -- as usual -- there’s no right or wrong answer to this controversy.  On one hand, I can see the issue; as a guy who hopes to write about characters of all shapes and sizes, including the improbably buxom, it’s disheartening to know that I can’t create whatever I want because somebody decided to take certain tools away from me.  And again, it implies that the mere presence of sexuality (such as it is, given that breasts are simply body parts) is the problem, not the context or execution of it.  On the other hand, it’s still possible to define a character by more than just a body type, especially since the potential is definitely there to cause a controversy.  Although given that the default bust size is generous, I wonder if it would make for some little girl avatars that raise a lot of questions.

But enough about that.  Let’s talk about my avatar for the game, Lariat.