Games, bad writing and misgenderings

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So, today Shin Megami Tensei 4 came out for the 3DS.  This, if you know me and how much I love this series, is a big deal.  Thanks to trade-ins (about the ONLY way I can afford new games at this time), I got this game completely free (and then Nintendo just gives me 30 bucks back anyway, so awesome).  Unfortunately for me, my wife is just as big a fan as I am, and we only have one 3DS so... yeah.  The good news is she hasn't stopped playing since we got home with it five hours ago (scratch that, she got up briefly to search for the charger so she could plug it in and keep playing), so apparently, it's very good and lives up to our hype for it.  The bad news is that means no new games for Lynn today.  XD

But it's okay.  Really.  It's not like I don't have a comic to write and draw and all that.  Besides, I can just replay some old things on my downtime.  ^_^

***

After doing three runs of Final Fantasy 5 a couple weeks ago for the Four Job Fiesta.  I decided to move on to some other games.  Notably, I kept a Final Fantasy streak going by moving on to FF6.  And after finishing that, I continued to FF7 which I am currently still on.  I'd like to stress the despite this game's immense popularity, FF7 was never really my favorite and it's actually been at least a decade since the last time I played it at this point.  But you know, a few years back, I replayed FF8 and FF10 and appreciated them both MUCH more the second time.  FF7 however is confounding me.  This game has not aged well.

Sure, it's ugly.  Even the hardest of the hardcore fanatics will agree with that.  But man, playing this as an adult (and serious writer) has really stressed how terrible the story and script here is.  Plotholes and unrealistic dialogue abound!  One could argue the age of the game should excuse that, but I wasn't having this issue NEARLY as often as the older FF5 and FF6 installments just a few weeks ago.  Maybe I'm supposed to "suspend my disbelief" because it's a stylized fantasy story, but even on those grounds it's hard to overlook.  I can't help but wonder how I never caught on to these things all those years ago when I last played it.  Now, I'm up to Cosmo Canyon and WISHING I had been logging these things since the beginning because this is so bad I'm started to laugh at things I really shouldn't.  I may start logging now.  

Could make for a fun post at a later date. XD

***

I also recently put an NES emulator on my phone.  For someone like me who never liked Angry Birds or Candy Crush Saga or any of those other phone games, and is just burned out with Tetris and Pinball for the time being, this offers nice little time wasters while I'm waiting for or on the bus.  And during my travels today, I started playing the original version of Dragon Warrior 3.  Now, this game has been remade twice (Gameboy Color and SNES), the latter of which is my favorite game of ALL time.  But I wanted to play this version because it was certainly more challenging (and I honestly can't even remember if I ever BEAT the original).  

One thing of particular note about Dragon Warrior 3, is that it actually may have been (correct me if I'm wrong) one of the first RPGs to allow you to choose the protagonist's sex. The remakes handled this really well (it changes what you look like, what equipment you can wear, how NPCs interact with you, etc).  However, I think this feature was just too complex for the original game back in it's era.  In this version, the sprites for the male and female protagonists are 100% identical (and looks decidedly more masculine), and every single NPC I've encountered so far still calls you "boy", "lad", "son" and all manner of male pronouns and titles.  The ONLY ways you even know you're playing a female character is through the status screen (which labels you "female") and the narration (for example, "_____ searches the area around her feet").

Say what you will, but this is actually pretty fascinating to me.  Whereas developers from way back in the day failed to adequately portray the experience of playing a female hero, they did an excellent job of accidentally portraying the experience of playing an oppressed male-to-female transsexual hero.  I mean, here we have a character who - through self-perception (status screen) and inner monologue (narration) - refers to herself as a woman.  Her appearance is still masculine, but perhaps she hasn't been able to start transition (after all, this game's setting is quite medieval; transition wouldn't even be an option yet).  And she is forced to listen to all the people in her life - including her mother! - refer to her as a boy all the time.  It's puts a sad twist on what was originally a pretty simplistic and straightforward story.  Maybe I'm just filling in the blanks on my own here (as this is almost definitely not what the developers actually intended), but I've never felt more close to this character than I do now, and I'm really, really into it.

***

And that's my weird rambling for the day.  Have a wonderful day, folks.  ^_^


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JamieAgathaRose's avatar
It just occurred to me, that if you really want to get into bad misgendering malarkey, play a female Evan on Maple Story. Even though the character Evan is canonically male, you can play a female version. But the game will still refer to you as "him", "he", "brother", "the farmer's son" and all this other nonsense being said to a girl running about in a sun dress and whacking mushrooms with a microphone.

Of course you get a pet dragon, so that eases the experience by tons. That's assuming you're able to get past the fact that it's MapleStory and it comes with all the bullshit that a Nexon game entails.