Seeric

When a creator of a work constantly finds reasons to dress a character in ridiculous clothing and/or frequently tosses them into embarrassing sexual situations and/or makes their defining personality "being madly in love with the bland protagonist" then the creator has harmed their own work as they have chosen not to use them as a believable, multi-faceted character that the audience can empathize and engage with in some way, but as a thing which exists primarily for teenagers to get off to and for certain adults to buy expensive figurines of.

Now, if the primary purpose of a work is to be pornographic in nature, then things are a bit different. In this case, all/most of the characters exist in the first place to arouse the audience; it's what the creator made them for and what the audience came there for. Sure, there might be some characterization or some sort of flimsy plot or even a bit of gameplay, but chances are that it's all window dressing crafted to enhance the fantasy and somehow make it even more erotic in the long run; anything in a porn game that takes away from the eroticism is subtracting from the work because it goes against the work's intended purpose of arousing its audience.

By that exact same token, when one of the primary purposes of a work is to tell a story that it wants its audience to take at least somewhat seriously, the characters in that story need to be within the audience's limits for suspension of disbelief and when a character is almost perpetually treated as an "erotic thing for the audience to salivate over" it goes beyond the majority of the audience's limits for suspending their belief and it subtracts from the work because it goes against the work's intended purpose of telling a somewhat believable story with somewhat believable characters.

"Press F to pay respects" is a reference which still gets mocked and parodied to this day because it's a giant, video game-y message that completely crashes through and shatters the somber tone the game was trying to craft; blatantly out of place pieces of eroticism in a non-pornographic game shatter the tone in much the same way. Games like Xenoblade Chronicles 2, to the best of my knowledge, do not primarily exist for erotic purposes so every time something so bizarre happens that it subtracts from the story and the believability of its characters for the sake of eroticism in the presumed audience it's harming its own narrative in order to cater to...people who are desperate for extremely softcore erotica in every form of media they consume? People who can't empathize with a character unless they're sexually aroused by them? Bizarre traditional expectations of fanservice being present in anime for the sake of it? I'm honestly not sure.

Framing is also incredibly important, just as important as the story and the characters themselves. For example, let's say the protagonist in a game commits an incredibly grotesque act in explicit detail (ex: murdered an entire town of unarmed civilians and then hid in a pile of their corpses to escape detection) while comedic music plays, the protagonist throws out a few one-liners, a little morality bar shifts closer to the "good person" side, and this act is required in order to obtain the "best ending". In this case, the protagonist has acted like a villain, yet the game has framed it (unironically) as "the right thing a true hero should do". As the player, you might be made uncomfortable by the protagonist's actions, but chances are you'll be even more uncomfortable to think that the creators of this product think that such actions are "good" and assume that their target audience will also think as much.

In a similar fashion, things like a character being made to dress in a maid outfit and be "a good servant" who panders to another character, putting all of that character's desires above their own, can be uncomfortable, but not necessarily in a bad way. The work in question could easily use music cues, internal monologue, and other such devices to frame this as a bad and unhealthy thing; the audience has been made uncomfortable, but they are meant to feel uncomfortable and it could all lead to a climatic moment of catharsis when the building tension finally snaps - uncomfortable, awkward, depressing, and horrifying situations in storytelling are not bad in and of themselves. What makes such things bad is when the work's own framing portrays such things as nothing more than lighthearted, harmless fun, as the healthy, normal way in which people should interact and should be expected to interact. Such things deserve to be discussed and evaluated rather than swept under the rug.

There's also a world of difference between a character "wearing a sexy outfit" and a character being deliberately framed in an objectifying way. When a character is clearly embarrassed by or otherwise extremely uncomfortable with what they're wearing, when the character constantly just happens to find themselves in situations where they need some sort of romantic advice from a bland teenage male protagonist, and especially when the camera frequently pans and zooms over various parts of a character's body, that's not just a character "being sexy", it's a company making the deliberate decision to make that character into an "object of desire" for their primary target audience.

To be clear, if someone wants to be turned on by video game characters that's fine and I don't think many people have a problem with that in and of itself, go ahead and do your thing. However, I do think it's incredibly disingenuous when people act like they can't understand why the content that they find arousing might make other players uncomfortable or when people pretend objectification simply doesn't exist when it's very easy to see it happening in a whole bunch of games if you simply pay attention to how the camera moves when focusing on some characters compared to others (the camera's not exactly taking every opportunity it can to zoom in on Nathan Drake's crotch and/or butt). I also think it's a bit silly to throw your hands up in the air and go "well it's marketed to teenage boys and sex sells so that's that, better stop playing this genre or games altogether" when there are plenty of examples out there of games where objectification isn't present or is, relatively speaking, extremely minor.

It's about par for the course for more mainstream JRPG's, though Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is an especially egregious example. I'd say it generally started happening around the PS2 era, partially because RPG's started leaning more towards "generic anime" settings over "generic European medieval fantasy" settings and partially because they started being marketed more towards teenagers/adults instead of younger children. This isn't to say that sexism in RPG's was virtually unheard of, RPG's are flooded with "fragile, nurturing healer" stereotypes and exceedingly few of them are male, but it started becoming more blatant around then.

I've watched enough anime and played enough video games (and Western games are easily just as guilty as Japanese games) to build up a fair bit of tolerance for this sort of stuff as long as the rest of the product is good, but there's definitely nothing wrong with pointing out problematic parts of things you like or an issue which is so prevalent that it saps some/most/all of the joy away from other elements.

All that being said, there are still plenty of JRPG's, which have significantly less creepy pandering than Xenoblade Chronicles 2, they just tend to be more niche. Falcom games tend to be at least 'okay overall' with their female characters. Dragon Quest was also already mentioned and anything else on the more whimsical side of the spectrum is likely going to be pretty low on characters dressed in chainmail bikinis and the like. As for Octopath, I haven't gotten around to playing it myself, but my understanding of it is that people were working themselves up over the early parts of Primrose's chapter and the path they were worried it would go down rather than the way it actually ended up playing out. Depending on if you're using JRPG to mean "strictly an RPG made in Japan" or "has some sort of turn-based combat system", there are also plenty of great indie RPG's which don't fetishize their female cast, such as Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass, Cosmic Star Heroine, Star Stealing Prince, and (it's even from Japan) Demon King Chronicle to name a few.

Depending on how this shakes out, it would be nice to have another platform which is more curated than Steam and itch, but not quite as gated as GOG. I do hope it ends up working out since Valve could really, really use more in the way of direct competition and Discord already has a big enough community to make that happen.

I'm torn on this one, though I'm leaning towards preferring if they took a break to watch a different show. Speaking from some fairly recent experience with binge watching Kai, the Buu saga has some really fun moments, especially early on, but it also has some of the worst parts of DBZ. Even in Kai there are a few stretches of episodes where it feels like the characters are standing around doing virtually nothing of note. There may technically not have been much filler to cut, but boy do some parts the Gotanks fight feel like they exist purely to waste time. I think there's a real possibility of Jeff and Dan burning out on DBZ (or anime in general), though maybe at least one of them will end up liking parts of the arc which I didn't care for.

Regardless, I think they're definitely going to move on to Buu before anything else.

It's not the best story and it's still ultimately about saving the world, but Dragon Quest 5 felt really refreshing. I loved that it spans a (by RPG standards) long stretch of time where you follow a single character across their life. I also like how the earlier portions of the game simply involve the main character trying to live their life and settle down rather than actively seeking to right the world's wrongs or get revenge on the villain.

There's also a fantastic obscure PC JRPG called Demon King Chronicle. It's hard to explain exactly what it's about and a lot of details concerning its plot and characters deliberately leave some room for interpretation, but the best way I can think to describe it is that it's "a story about the nature of stories". It has stories within stories, stories about characters telling stories, and attempts to address how we shape stories and are in turn shaped by them. I'm probably making it sound more obtuse than it actually is (though it's not exactly straightforward either), but I'd strongly recommend it to anyone who likes that sort of stuff.

She did the customer service equivalent of being slightly rude to a single customer who unintentionally came off as condescending after having dealt with deliberately condescending customers every single day. Said customer then walked out the door feeling a little sad, but shrugged it off and did not file a complaint. At that point, every single other customer in the store along with a massive crowd of people who had never shopped there before decided to scream at her and file insincere complaints in the name of the person who was already long gone and back to enjoying his day. It's an absolutely absurd situation.

Also, you're sort of tripping over yourself to fantasize about ArenaNet having reprimanded her previously even though there is, to the best of my knowledge, absolutely 0 evidence of such a thing and the little evidence we do have points in the opposite direction. If you want to defend her being fired over a single tweet then by all means do so. However, if being fired over a single tweet sounds so ridiculous to you that you have to go out of your way to assume that she *must* have been reprimanded previously, then perhaps that's because what she was fired over was, in fact, ridiculous.

Black Desert Online has action-y combat and only requires a fairly low initial entry fee. There's honestly not much to it and it doesn't have much of any endgame to speak of so it doesn't make for a good long-term solution, but it's good if you're looking for a game where you can just relax and kill some time while bouncing between other MMO's.

I'd strongly suggest turning off or at least ignoring global chat though. It's filled with people from the most tiresome parts of the 4chan and GG crowds endlessly repeating the same handful of incredibly stale meme jokes almost 24/7. I tried out the game again after quitting for a year or so and when I came back people in global chat were still constantly making some of the same jokes as when I first played alongside a handful of new ones that got repeated dozens of times throughout the day every single day.

Well, the "Tug O'War" minigame in Mario Party led to me physically damaging the palm of my hand with the N64 analog stick as a kid, so I'm going to go with that one.

Mine would probably be Iconoclasts followed very closely by Celeste and Card Quest.