Feminized Franchises
A guy's perspective on "girlified" franchises. Let the debate begin!
by Sinan Kubba 
Dot's Intro:
What is an article by a guy doing on a girl gaming website? CDG is not only for the gals. As a locale for alternative perspectives on the gaming world with a particular interest in gender, we are an open forum for men and women alike to consider culturally and socially relevant issues in the gaming world, so Sinan's article fits the bill. He asks us to consider the "girlification" of "guy's games" to woo us girl gamers. Read on and let the debate begin!
Sinan 'shoinan' Kubba is a un-muscly man-person who's contributes reviews, previews and news (and other ews) for LastWordGaming, and writes all his other gaming thoughts in his own blog called You Have Lost! (http://shoinan.wordpress.com).
“Honey, don’tcha know, I’m more than Pac-Man with a bow!”
Ms. Pac-Man boisterously warbled that lyric in her 1982 TV commercial, and the jaundiced diva’s self analysis was not wrong. Pac-Man’s spouse may have sported cute accessories and flashy make-up, but her charm and beauty was more than skin-deep. Ms. Pac-Man, the sequel to the arcade phenomenon starring her husband, offered new mazes, faster gameplay and cleverer AI than its iconic predecessor, and many fans consider it to be the superior title of the two. It’s difficult to quantify just how important gaming’s first female protagonist was. Would there have been a Chun-Li, Samus Aran or Lara Croft without her? Maybe Marge Simpson summed up her significance best some ten years later as she reminisced about how Ms. Pac-Man “struck a blow for women’s rights” in the 80s. Maybe not.
The truth of the matter is that despite its trailblazing importance, in reality Ms. Pac-Man was little more than a minor alteration of pixels and a clever tweaking of gameplay. Midway’s cunning ploy to get girls into gaming by feminizing their most popular franchise was both unsubtle and very, very effective. Over two decades on, women are now not only recognised within the videogame market, but are seen as a fast-growing and highly significant portion of it, and websites like ChicksDigGames are excellent testament to that. In fact, videogames with ‘chicks’ primarily in mind are now relatively commonplace, and represent a lucrative opportunity for money-hungry publishers looking for a game that can market itself, such as Ubisoft’s critically despised Imagine series (including Imagine babyz and Imagine Figure Skater which both sound disturbing out-of-context). It’s a series that targets young girl gamers just as unsubtly as Ms. Pac-Man had before it.
However, unlike Ms. Pac-Man, the overwhelming majority of these titles, including the Imagine games, are brand-new intellectual properties. Taking an existing franchise like Pac-Man and giving it a fabulous feminine makeover is a daunting prospect for game companies, worried about alienating their existing audience and failing to impress those previously uninterested. Of course, that’s not stopped some of the braver developers from trying to give their games an arguably inadvisable sex change.
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a princess, duh.
Undoubtedly the most notable example of a franchise getting girlified is actually the most famous videogame series of them all. Yes, it’s-a him, Mario, and the game in question is-a Super Princess Peach, Nintendo & TOSE’s 2006 title for the DS. Whereas Midway were forced to let a new character take centre-stage, the Mario series could offer the familiar and popular pouting face of Princess Peach, the poorly-secured ruler of the Mushroom Kingdom.
Almost every Mario platformer since Super Mario Bros. has involved the plump plumber having to rescue his darling Peachy from Bowser’s clutches, but Super Princess Peach does not stick to this tried-and-tested formula. This time around Bowser has decided to capture Mario, Luigi and the Toads instead - presumably he’s as bored as I am of the time-honoured cycle of stealing princesses only for them to be snatched back from under his snorting nose. Thus, the resucee becomes the rescuer, and Peach is entrusted with the captives’ safe return. It’s a Lois-saves-Clark role reversal, and it’s to be applauded. A word of caution, however - don’t clap too hard just yet.
Super Princess Peach is a 2D platformer with aesthetics and gameplay reminiscent of Super Nintendo classic Yoshi’s Island. It’s not nearly as challenging as a typical Mario affair, but it’s intended for a younger audience so that’s largely forgivable. What is less forgivable is the game’s shtick, namely how Peach gains her powers. Super Princess Peach is littered with puzzles that require our heroine to use said abilities, and these abilities are her moods. Yes, moods. Peach can activate one of four emotions at any time using the DS’s touch screen, the emotions being Calm, Gloom, Joy and Rage. Joy, for example, will whip the princess into a whirlwind of happiness, letting her float through the air carefree, whilst Gloom will cause her to cry huge streams of tears that can make plants grow, as well as letting her run a lot quicker (for some bizarre reason).
I could rephrase that, saying that Princess Peach can call on her emotions at will to manipulate her environment, crying one moment and then smiling the next, if that’s what she needs to do in order to succeed. Not such a role model any more, is she? Peach’s oversensitivity and emotional liability would appear to play on outdated female stereotypes, especially when Nintendo are equating crying and happy floating with gender-specific superpowers. As former Gamespot reviewer Ryan Davis pointed out, there are some “weird sexist undercurrents” to Super Princess Peach, but, when you think about it, she’s not that much different in this game than she is in previous Mario titles. It’s arguable that her stereotypical femininity is simply highlighted in Super Princess Peach because she’s given the limelight, and that to have expected anything different would have been foolish. I could go even further and say that she should be praised for being more in touch with her emotions than her stoic male counterparts, although that argument seems flawed since Mario is so exuberantly happy that you’d think those mushrooms were laced with Prozac.
So, should we celebrate Super Princess Peach for its table-turning modern-day plotline or decry it for its undermining sexist gameplay? Feminizing the Mario franchise in such a manner may have produced mixed critical reactions, but whichever way you look at it, and like Ms. Pac-Man before it, its significance is unarguable. Super Princess Peach was one of many female-orientated titles that cemented the Nintendo DS as a valid gaming platform for a female audience – over 1 million copies sold worldwide is proof of the pudding.Let’s face it, Nintendo knew that something with the word ‘princess’ on the box was all that was needed to entice little girls into buying a cute pink DS bundled with Super Princess Peach. In comparison, however, New Super Mario Bros would later go on to sell a whopping 13 million copies worldwide. Make of that what you will.
Genetics Joke: X-2 = XX
A maturer title to be given the feminine touch was Final Fantasy, specifically X-2. The hugely popular Final Fantasy series is considered by many to be the definitive Japanese RPG franchise, and Final Fantasy X took that definitive J-RPG experience to new and breathtaking grounds for the first time on the PlayStation 2. Many cited the 10th instalment to be the best Final Fantasy since the famously groundbreaking VII, offering up next-gen visuals in a compulsively deep univere with great gameplay to boot. The recently-merged Square-Enix seemed to think so too, releasing Final Fantasy X-2 two years later, a direct sequel to X, and therefore for the first time in its history the series had a game that took place in one of its pre-existing universes. The hype generated was inevitable.
X-2 continued the story of Yuna, the female lead of the last game. In the futuristic yet desolate world of Final Fantasy X, Yuna was a reserved and thoughtful summoner of aeons. She was endearingly feminine, kind and caring, but she was also, as so many Final Fantasy females are, determined and full of fight. Our heroine du jour undertook a dangerous pilgrimage across the planet that she believed would help her defeat Sin, a terrible monster that was literally tearing apart the world. The twist was that Yuna would have to sacrifice herself to save the day . Unfortunately, it actually ended with central character and love interest Tidus making the sacrifice instead of her, and Yuna lives to celebrate the world not ending, but sadly on her lonesome. Final Fantasy X’s story was mature, spiritual, dark, and told with heart.
To say Final Fantasy X-2’s story is light-hearted in comparison would be an understatement. The game starts off with Yuna now a vivaceous and sexy pop star... and it only gets worse from there. When our previously shy summoner is not singing in front of thousands , she’s treasure-hunting as part of the Gullwings, a scantily-clad all-girl brigade with a penchant for striking silly poses. With no pilgrimage to wind the days along, the Gullwings take up various exciting missions on the planet. These mission include singing and learning dance steps (obviously), as well as the martial arts of distracting enemies with back massages and covert cosplay. X-2’s plot does eventually stumble into more serious political grounds, but the game’s fluffy presentation, including its bouncy musical score and garish, handwritten fonts, does little to make its players take it seriously (but maybe that was the intention).
Thankfully the typical Final Fantasy combat features heavily, but that’s just as tarnished by the new Charlie’s Angels-esque theme as the rest of the bubbly affair is. Using dress spheres and garment grids (that’s really what they’re called), Yuna and her Gullwings can magically change their outfits, sorry, jobs during battles in order to grant them different abilities. For example, Yuna may be a J-poppy songstress one minute, but be draped in the somewhat revealing costume of her Lady Luck dress sphere the next. Each job change is accompanied by a technically impressive but shamefully provocative transformation sequence, reminiscent of the infamous and equally shameful sequences present in Japanese anime Sailor Moon, which involved schoolgirls turning into superheroines wearing sexier schoolgirl costumes, suggesting their powers were linked to the length of their skirts. Frankly, both of these transformations are just gratuitous and more than a bit disturbing.
So, whilst X-2 produced Final Fantasy’s first ever all-female cast of playable characters, its change in style unsurprisingly found mixed reaction. However, in comparison to Super Princess Peach, its feminization produced a more divided opinion. Some players liked X-2’s milder tone, new direction and change-up of gameplay, whilst others found it to be a bit too girly, with one harsher critic referring to it being little more than a glorified dress-up game. Was the heavy inclusion of fashion again playing to stereotypes or just referential to female traits? Is fashion an inappropriate feature of a mature role-playing-game’s combat system, or a light-hearted and praiseworthy diversion from the norm? Was X-2 an excellent and unique addition to the Final Fantasy family or just an annoying little cousin who played with her dolls too much?
Big Devils Don’t Cry
For a lot Final Fantasy X fans, and your author included, X-2’s ostensible over-femininity was just too alienating. The number of those put- off is probably about 3 million... well, if you’re going by retail sales anyway.Final Fantasy X has sold nearly 8 million copies worldwide, whereas X-2 comes in at just over 5 million. X-2, from a marketing perspective, is more of an enigma than Super Princess Peach. Why did Square-Enix shake up the tone so much? Did they think that, like the Charlie’s Angels films, the game would appeal to both sexes by having something for everyone, namely sexy girls and action for the boys with feminine thematics and hunks for the girls? Final Fantasy X-2 is a direct sequel to the tenth instalment of a long-running franchise that keeps to the fairly rigid RPG genre, so it would seem unlikely to attract new players, let alone new female players. As confusing as the change of direction Square-Enixtook with X-2 is, it still sold a whopping 5 million. Considering the severely reduced development costs by reusing assets from the original game, Final Fantasy X-2 was a fantastic success, at least economically.
In some ways it’s understandable that Square-Enixand Nintendo thought they could lure girls to Super Princess Peach and Final Fantasy X-2 because both series have been popular with female players before. On the other hand, it makes the careless feminization of both games so baffling. They come across as being shamefully sexist, and that would only serve to alienate and distance women from the franchise in the future.
So the question that naturally follows is ‘how do you actually attract girl gamers into a male-dominated franchise?’ Is there any way that Bungie, for example, could make Halo 4 more appealing to women without decreasing the appeal to men, or is that completely impossible? Would Halo 4 have to become a totally different game to be desirable to high numbers of both men and women?
The answers may seem obvious on first reading, but it does depend on your perspective. Are you looking to get more girls who don’t play videogames interested in gaming through your franchise, or more girl-gamers interested in your franchise? The first must be much harder than the second, since it presents two hurdles rather than one, and that first hurdle is a pretty big one.
If I knew the total number of male gamers and female gamers there are in the world, and how many of them played Halo 3, I could probably demonstrate that there are far more guys playing Halo 3 than girls, but the numbers would probably be a lot closer for an attach rate per gender. Girl gamers, the ones putting in significant hours at least, are not likely to be playing girly games. There are probably many reasons for that, but I think one of the important ones is quality. It’s not a matter of what girl gamers want from a videogame, but what any gamer wants from a videogame, and that’s quality. There may be preferences, sure, but every gamer wants a good level of entertainment from a product, and the highest quality titles are still the ones aimed at the hardcore market. Since the hardcore market remains dominated by men, these hardcore titles are naturally male-orientated.
I think another potential reason is age. The Entertainment Software Association, the same people who stated that 38% of gamers are female, believes that the average age of a gamer is 33. That brings us full circle to the beginning of this article. According to the ESA, the current average gamer’s age in 1982 would be 7. That sounds like a pretty good age to be playing Ms. Pac-Man to me. It’s difficult to dispute that a lot of girl gamers got into gaming thanks to the pizza-pie heroine, and that it’s taken a long time to get from Ms. Pac-Man to Super Princess Peach. Any game worthy of your attention in the 80s and 90s was targeted extremely at the small hardcore audience of male teenage gamers, and if you were a girl gamer during those two wonderful decades, it’s more than likely you grew up with a lot of games that were made for boys. It stands to reason that older girl gamers are used to, and also enjoy, the same games that older guy gamers do.
Plenty of girl gamers have played Devil May Cry games, for example, a hack-and-slash series that is probably one of the most objectifying of women in gaming. Why? It’s cheesy, it’s silly and whilst it may seem at first like a game made for teenage boys who like cutting enemies up into little bits, it delivers charming male protagonists that are far sexier than the many big-breasted women they meet. The hack-and-slash action is not about quantity, or strength, but is actually all about style, a quality that gives it the feel of a wacky action movie full of ridiculous stunts. In many ways, Devil May Cry games are actually the masculine equivalents of Charlie’s Angels films, full of something for everyone even though they may feel like predominantly male-orientated titles outwardly. Whilst the women do sport ridiculous chests, they are seen to be powerful and strong characters, confident in their sexiness and femininity, and that makes them better than a prissy princess as a role-model.
Maybe the answer is not to girlify a franchise, but more to demasculinize it. As a guy, I can say that the ridiculous sizes of the weaponry and busts present in the majority of modern-day games do not do anything for me. Would Soul Calibur IV sell any less if Taki’s breast physics were removed and the poor girl was given a sports bra? Do people really care about the gargantuan size of their character’s muscles in Unreal Tournament 3? At the end of the day, as with most gamers, the thing I care most about is how much fun the game is to play. The testerone level of a game is simply not relevant to me, whereas it may be a negative factor for a potentially interested girl-gamer. Make a game for everyone, and everyone will be happy.
I doubt it’s as simple as that, however, and especially with an established franchise. After all, how do you make a series like Soul Calibur into something that will appeal to everyone? Still, it does highlight the oddities of Final Fantasy X-2 and Super Princess Peach, two girlified franchised games that managed to demean women more than any other titles in their series. Seriously, Peach crying is her superpower? Come on Nintendo, it’s the 21st century. Let the poor girl wear some pants already.
Sinan 'shoinan' Kubba is a un-muscly man-person who's contributes reviews, previews and news (and other ews) for LastWordGaming (http://www.lastwordgaming.com), and writes all his other gaming thoughts in his own blog called You Have Lost! (http://shoinan.wordpress.com).
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First off:
Peach emotional cry-power? Seriously offensive. You nailed that. Please, cover me in pink bows so I can play tea party with all my stuffed animals, Nintendo.
>Girl gamers, the ones putting in significant hours at least, are not likely to be playing girly games. There are probably many reasons for that, but I think one of the important ones is quality. It’s not a matter of what girl gamers want from a videogame, but what any gamer wants from a videogame, and that’s quality.
Beautifully said, thank you. A few of the girly games *are* fun, but they're usually pretty decent games in and of themselves. The Cooking Mama series is fun for me because I'm a professional cook, and honestly, it's a cool way to use the consoles' capabilities. (Although I find the precision on the DS is exponentially greater.)
>Was the heavy inclusion of fashion again playing to stereotypes or just referential to female traits?
You know, when playing the game, I kind of rolled my eyes a little when I saw the first costume change thing, but I took it more as a FF Tactics job change than dress up. I have to admit, I like good graphics, and even though I'm a chick, I like pretty girls, so while a little stereotypical, it didn't bug me too much.
You really made me think hard, and try to assess my feelings about FFX2. As an older girl gamer, I took the whole "girls club, no boys allowed" thing as "oh, I remember that stage in my life." I'm not sure how to describe it. I took it more as Yuna branching out and trying new things in a quasi-safe environment. I think a lot of strong women go through the "grrrrrl power!" phase, and it seems to me that most gamer girls are strong women. Maybe that was the 'hook' there. Or it was just dopey sexism.
>Would Soul Calibur IV sell any less if Taki’s breast physics were removed and the poor girl was given a sports bra?
Amen, brother. All I can ever think of when I see the boob physics at work is: ow. ow. ow. But seriously -
>Maybe the answer is not to girlify a franchise, but more to demasculinize it. As a guy, I can say that the ridiculous sizes of the weaponry and busts present in the majority of modern-day games do not do anything for me.
I agree and disagree. I think that the bust size in games is pretty out of control, and it's just as stupid a thing to do to the general public as heroin-thin models in mass media. As the mom of a gamer, it cheeses me off that the human form 'idealized' is almost physically impossible. If my kid goes looking for Lara Croft, he's going to be disappointed. But - that doesn't only apply to females, as you point out. Truthfully, I think Gordon Freeman and Alyx are excellent examples that heroes don't have to have their bodies exaggerated to be engaging.
Where I disagree is that I can see the use of making guns progressively larger in a game. It can act as a visual cue that you're packing more firepower, and help advance the game. That being said, some of the guns are way over the top. If you're starting with a gun that covers the whole of your arm, how far can you really go from there?
Thanks again for making me think! :)
Games should be more realistic, but movies aren't so... yeah.
Check out most horror movies sometime. Large breasted women that run and almost get knocked out in the process.
Anyways.. Cheers and thank you.