Top 10, Again and Again

By now we're all used to the Top 10 [Somethings] in [Something] lists that proliferate all over the internets (e.g., Top 10 Most Clichéd Items on the Internet). Top 10 women in gaming lists are a frequent enough occurrence that there's no need for any more of them (see, e.g., yada yada). The other day, though, I was directed to a blog called ShinyShiny that apparently is in the business of explaining tech gadgets to helpless females(?). The specific article to which I was directed is a top ten list of female video-game characters you should idolise [sic x 2], which is a new enough twist on an old favorite that I was willing to give it a look.

I gave up hope for the ShinyShiny list as soon as I saw Ico's Yorda at number nine. It's true that Yorda can open some doors with magic that the protagonist can not otherwise get through, as they noted. That doesn't outweigh her role in the bulk of the game, which is spent dragging her along behind you like a deadweight, literally leading her around by the hand, helping her jump across tiny gaps and coaxing her up steps, yelling at her, and defending her from shadow monsters. She's completely helpless, and, should you turn your back on her for even a moment, she'll wander off and get into some terrible predicament. I don't understand how she is worthy of idolization. Is it because she's taller than Ico? Did ShinyShiny even play Ico?

Likewise, simply having appeared in many games doesn't make a character worthy of idolization. Consider Princess Zelda of Legend of Zelda fame: She's certainly physically lovely, magically powerful, and deeply good in ever fiber of her being, but she isn't a good candidate for an idol---i.e., someone to look up to and emulate. Advising a woman to idolize Princess Zelda is advising her to play a supporting role in her own story. (For the same reason, Yuna Braska of FFX and FFX-2 didn't make my cut.) Moreover, there isn't "one" Princess Zelda to idolize; every Legend of Zelda game features a different Zelda. Is this what I should idolize? A series of women, each interchangeable with all the others? Should I aspire to be confused with anyone who happens to have the same name as me?

It's not that there's anything wrong with Princess Zelda or Princess Yorda. They're both very interesting, multifaceted characters and have appeared in some of the greatest games ever made. It's just that those qualities aren't something to be idolized or emulated by real-life women. Trying to behave like Yorda would be just as foolish and ridiculous as trying to look like Lara Croft. And anyway, not every female character has to be admirable and aspirational---just like not all male video game characters are great role models. It's just that if you're going to compile and put forth a list of female characters who are worthy of idolization, I feel like a little care should be taken to see that they have some quality that makes them worth admiring (other than having "ethereal good looks" or "great hair"), or at least that you can put forth a legitimate reason why you feel they make a good role model (see Shiny's blurb on Zelda).

Without any more complaning, here is my Top 10 List of Video Game Women You Can Actually Idolize.

10. Beauty Queen Etna (Disgaea). Etna doesn't get to be a Netherworld Demon Lord by using her feminine charms. Instead, she fights her way tooth and nail to the top and then bestows upon herself the title of Beauty Queen. Etna never asks anybody for anything; if she wants something, she goes out and gets it---often, she takes it. And she makes no apologies for her caustic sense of humor. I'm looking forward to the PSP remake of Disgaea: Hour of Darkness with an all-new Etna-based storyline branch.

9. Chun-Li (Street Fighter). "I'm the strongest woman in the world!" Of all the fighting games in all the arcades in all the world, she walks into mine. There are a lot of fighting games out there with a lot of token cheesecake characters, but Chun-Li has been there from the start; her Lightning Kick and Kikoken are iconic; and her little dance of joy when she wins---"Ha, ha, ha, Yatta!"---taught a whole generation of boys to be ashamed when they got beat by a girl.

8. Rydia (Final Fantasy IV). I didn't want to flood the list with Final Fantasy characters, so I had to be pretty choosy. Rydia isn't the most memorable FF character (maybe I'm showing my age by remembering her), but she fairly embodies personal growth. Rydia is the only FF character we see grow from a child to a young woman in the course of a game. She's also the first powerful summoner of the Final Fantasy series. Throughout the Final Fantasy games, the female characters have always tended toward the mage classes while the male characters tend to be the fighters. As a summoner, Rydia was an incredibly powerful damage dealer, blazing the trail for later summoners like Garnet and Yuna.

7. Princess Peach (Super Mario Brothers). Princess Peach evolved from Donkey Kong's Lady (aka Pauline) character, the original damsel in distress. In recent years, however, Peach has really come into her own. Sure, she still needs to be rescued every now and then, but now she does the rescuing sometimes, too (see, e.g., Super Princess Peach). She was a playable character as early as 1988 in Super Mario Brothers 2, and since then she's been holding her own in other titles like the Paper Mario series and the Mario Party series. She's also proved an able go-kart racer, tennis player, golfer, and even a basketball player. She also made an appearance as a formidable fighter in Super Smash Brothers Melee. All without breaking a nail.

6. Impa (Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time). There have been several Impas over the years; we met her first in the original Legend of Zelda and just recently we ran into one of her descendants in Twilight Princess. For my money, the most admirable Impa is the iteration found in the Ocarina of Time. As the young princess's nursemaid and bodyguard, Impa---last of the warrior race of Sheikah---whisks the child Zelda away from Hyrule Castle ahead of disaster and spends the next seven years teaching her young charge everything she needs to know so that, when the time comes, Zelda will be ready to do her part to save Hyrule. When that mission is completed she takes up her post as the Shadow Sage. Impa is both nurturing and ass-kicking, a hallmark of the wise warrior archetype.

5. Ms. Pac-Man (Ms. Pac-Man). When Ms. Pac-Man first pakku-pakku'd her way onto the arcade scene in 1981 she was a female original. The only other lady in the land was Lady from Donkey Kong, and Lady was just a damsel. Ms. Pac-Man, the first female video game protagonist of all time, could do everything that Pac-Man could do---but she was actually faster than Pac-Man and, as a bonus, she had a sassy bow and a cute mole.

4. Jill Valentine (Resident Evil). The original Zombie Stomper from Resident Evil. She could carry more stuff than Chris Redfield (maybe she had a purse?) and open doors with her lock picks, but she couldn't take as much damage as Chris. One of the most common arguments supporting uneven representation of women in video games is that "men play games, and people want to play characters that represent them." Moreover, as I learned in the MMORPG wars, when men play a female character they want a fine (and largely unclothed) female body to watch to make it interesting. Resident Evil split the difference by offering two protagonists from the start. One man, one woman; both completely capable, each with unique advantages and challenges. Jill Valentine wasn't a skinny, skanky supermodel with a couple of guns and a hankerin' for some zombie spankerin'. She really did give the impression of being a fully capable, totally badass paramilitary solider.

3. Ashelia B'nargin Dalmasca (Final Fantasy XII). The best female protagonist in an FF game in a long time (but with the worst name). Ashe is sort of an evolved form of FFIX's Garnet. More than anything, I appreciate her bringing the Final Fantasy series back around to more of an expansive epic plot and certainly more of a group dynamic than in recent games. Ashe isn't the narrator (narratrix?) of FFXII, but she is the main character and protagonist. A young widow, resistance leader, and displaced monarch, Ashe is incredibly accomplished for a nineteen-year-old. She's not afraid to indulge her emotions, but she knows when to move beyond them.

2. Amaterasu Okami (Okami). When the sun goddess Amaterasu has to come down to Earth, she doesn't choose to come in the form of a scantily clad bimbo, but in that of the legendary white wolf Shiranui. Her mission is purely benevolent: Armed only with a celestial paintbrush, to restore all the color of the world and drive out an unnatural darkness. Apparently, she is also endowed with infinite patience (I would never have been able to put up with Issun).

1. Samus Aran (Metroid). We spent the whole game of Metroid thinking Samus was a dude. Why? Because she was clad head to toe in her power suit and it didn't have built-in breasts or a tiny cinched waist; because the instruction manual referred to Samus as "he"; but mostly because we had never seen a female character in a video game before who wasn't sitting around waiting to be rescued, and we certainly didn't see them flying around space shooting brains with their totally awesome ray guns. Only Ms. Pac-Man approaches Samus's early protagonist status, and never forget that Ms. Pac-Man was just having a snack; Samus Aran was saving the whole galaxy.


Honorable Mentions
---Judge Magister Drace (FFXII). I would have given Drace a spot in the main list, but her appearance in FFXII is so brief. Drace is the only female among the Judge Magisters of the Archadean Empire and the champion of the youthful Prince Larsa. Drace is a decent person first and a judge second, and she proves herself when she attempts to arrest her corrupt monarch, even knowing that the futile effort will cost her life.

---Mama (Cooking Mama). No, she's not saying "You're not mine!" when you mess up. She's saying "Do not mind!" Mama doesn't want you to feel bad when you burn the toast or drop the eggs on the floor. She just wants to spend time with her kids, doing something fun and educational (cooking). It's too bad more mamas aren't like her.

Bid Me Discourse, I Will Enchant Thine . . . Arm?

(One Step Forward, Two Steps Back)

The crux of the issue is that I really want to know the street date for Enchanted Arms for the PS3, but I’m afraid to ask. The two main reasons (for my fear) are: First, that I don’t want to hear any PS3 jokes; and, second, neither do I want to hear any Enchanted Arms jokes. I’m a fan of JRPGs, so when reviews arise that advise against purchasing a game based on the fact that the game in question---itself in fact a JRPG---exhibits characteristics suspiciously like those found in a---wait for it!---JRPG, I may somehow not be warned off buying it. But I don’t fancy getting into this conversation with the clerk at EBStop, so I am loathe to call them up and enquire about the street date. Wikipedia says March 13. Gamestop.com says March 27. Ubisoft is only confirming March, 2007. I averaged the two street dates and came up with March 20, which is good enough for the moment.

The street date for Enchanted Arms isn’t really the crux of the issue, however. That was all just a clever ruse. Apparently the game is a piece---I still want to/intend to give it a try, but, to be fair, I hear it’s really terrible. I checked out some comments on the web from players of the previously released X-Box 360 version, and I must say there was an almost palpable sense of displeasure wafting up from the forums. Complaints cover the whole spectrum: People just don’t like the gameplay; the graphics aren’t very good for "next gen"; the voice acting is terrible; the plot is lame; the encounter rate is uneven and generally engineered badly; the battle mechanics are troublesome; the list goes on, and on, and on.

What I did not find on the list was any complaint about the fact that one of the main party characters in Enchanted Arms, Makoto, is a flamboyant transvestite and homosexual. In a demographic primarily populated by males aged 14 to 35 (my approximation), and specifically by the subgroup (X-Box 360 owners) that enjoys games based on shooting every living thing that isn’t from the same country/planet as them, I was pleasantly surprised to find such a complete and utter lack of bigotry in terms of this game.

Congratulations, gaming industry, for your sensitivity! Kudos to you, Ubisoft, for your inclusive sexual politics! I think we should all be very proud of ourselves. Although gaming is often maligned as a catalyst for violence and a hotbed of unfortunate stereotypes, you must admit that the industry has a long and illustrious history of tolerance for transvestism in its products.

Perhaps the most famous and most inspiring instance is Princess Zelda’s male alter ego, Sheik, from The Ocarina of Time. After narrowly escaping Ganondorf’s clutches as a young child, Zelda spends the next seven years, while Link is frozen in the Temple of Time, studying the arts of war under her tutor and bodyguard, Impa. She then returns to Hyrule disguised as (or magically transformed into?) a man in order to aid Link in the battle against Ganondorf and his evil influence. A major theme of The Legend of Zelda series is that of disguising and/or discovering one’s true nature. Even as The Ocarina of Time begins, Link learns that he is actually a Hylian after having been raised as a Kokiri for his whole life. So it is, too, with Zelda, one of the most archetypically feminine characters in the entire genre, who must discover her untapped potential as a warrior in order to save her kingdom after having been raised as a pampered princess for her whole life.

This is one of the oldest plot devices in the history of the book: In order to accomplish her goal, a woman must disguise herself as a man. We don't even bat an eye at this, because we all know that the heroine won't be able to accomplish anything if everyone knows she's a woman. Eventually, inevitably, her hair and breasts will come tumbling out of their hiding places and the male lead will fall in love on the spot, ending the lady's cross-dressing career forever. Shakespeare did it. Tolkien, too. Even Disney has tapped this one without raising any eyebrows.

For some reason, though, it's a completely different story when it's a man dressing as a woman.

As early as 1988, when Nintendo rolled out Super Mario Bros. 2 (arguably one of the weirdest games of all time), they were already on the path to equal representation for sexual minorities. One of the first boss fights was versus Birdo, a pink dinosaur-bird-thing that hopped around like mad and spat eggs at you. The instruction manual had this to say of him: "He thinks he is a girl and he spits eggs from his mouth. He'd rather be called 'Birdetta.'" Later documentation insists that Birdo has always been a girl.

This backpedaling would be distasteful enough if Nintendo were trying to conceal a cross-dresser in the otherwise irreproachable Super Mario Brothers family, but the truth is actually worse. Although at the time---I was seven?---I didn't find anything particularly strange or funny about Birdo, I now suspect that s/he was intended to be a joke---ala, that guy who wants so badly to be a woman that he's quite literally got eggs spewing out of him. In order to defeat Birdo, the player is tasked with catching the eggs in midair and hurling them back at Birdo until s/he is knocked unconscious, dropping the key to the next level. (I don't think that metaphor needs any explanation.)

Which brings me back to the case of Enchanted Arms, in a sort of roundabout way. What I mean to point out is that it’s hardly revolutionary to feature a transvestite in a video game. (Much more revolutionary is that Makoto is also gay, which doesn’t seem to have been the case with Sheik, or even at issue with Birdo.) Ubisoft, you don't score any points for being on the cutting edge of youth subculture. It's been done before. What would have scored some points, and been truly revolutionary, would have been to include a transvestite or homosexual character who isn't a running joke, as Makoto appears to be. From Ubisoft's website:

Atsuma and Toya's classmate at Enchant University. Atsuma and Toya are his best friends. Makoto is openly gay and his friends like to call him the "yellow otomegokoro."* He is blindly in love with Toya and centers all of his actions and thoughts around Toya. Makoto has a confrontational attitude with Atsuma because he is jealous of Atsuma and Toya's close friendship.

* According to this dictionary, "otomegokoro" seems to translate to "girl's feeling, maiden's mind."

I was proud to see people in the gaming community refraining from making fun of this character, even when Ubisoft appears to have set him up as comic relief, in favor of making fun of more concrete aspects of the game, like the gameplay. Ubisoft's brief description of him defines him only in terms of his relationship to his "best friends," Toya and Atsuma, who call him names. I wonder if they also throw eggs at him? I'll have to play the game for myself to really assess the situation, but you have to admit, on the surface at least, it looks pretty bad.

Therefore, in conclusion: If you know the street date for Enchanted Arms PS3, can you please leave a message in the comments? kthxbye