To be honest one reason why I oppose Social Justice Warriors and people like Anita Sarkeesian so heavily is because a lot of what they say is simply untrue on so many subjects. The whole schtick about sexy, poorly-written, poorly designed female characters who exist only to appeal to dudes is one those areas. At least with Anita she was outed as a scam artist for those who have paid attention, and tied to various similar human exploitation scams to take advantage of the easily lead along with others in the same business (self help gurus and the like) and even had one of her previous projects, a handwriting analysis scam, exposed directly and tied to here... she's a confidence trickster doing her thing, SJWs as a general rule are harder to excuse for being lead.
As a general rule it's actually fairly hard to find many genuinely poorly written female characters anymore, when you do see it, it tends to be the result of all around bad writing in the game itself, rather than anything specific to that character. For well over a decade now there has been a lot of effort put into video game writing, not always successfully, but the effort has been made. If a game has romantic subplots involving the player character, effort has usually been put into the options involved in the game. As a general rule when people scream about poorly developed female characters it usually comes from people who have not played the game through and made VERY superficial judgements.
That said do not confuse "poorly written" with "stereotypes", the latter not being entirely a bad thing, since a stereotype can be good when well written, and stereotypes and archetypes exist because they are grounded fairly well in both reality and convention. Just because some female warrior isn't re-defining the role and acting entirely different from every other one before does not mean it's badly written, just that the role is as expected. To be fair male characters fall into the same trap, and one criticism of all media after a while is that we've seen it all before, since genuinely fresh concepts come along once or twice in a generation and then get exploited to becoming stereotypes themselves.
Today "poorly written" seems to be code for something not fitting with someone's social agenda. For all the comments about liberation, at the end of the day it seems your typical SJW-type feminist or their supporter is offended by the very idea that a woman might not want to dominate or come out in front of a man, be content to play support, love and pursue someone, or god forbid... actually want to have recreational sex for their own benefit. If a girl isn't roaring in your face and giving you a ton of crap, or implies she actually enjoys recreational sex, then obviously that's male fantasy and it's bad.
As a general shout out I'll say that given the increasing focus on story, I think "Final Fantasy" probably has the best all around female characters as a group. For me the stand outs have probably been Quistis and Rikku in part because they started out "obvious" love interests within their respective storylines, before the actual love interest showed up, pursued the main character for a while, but then later found their own ways to remain both friends and relevant to the respective plots. I feel this kind of thing is a big harder to write and have it flow naturally than it is to just throw out a sexy love interest and write that well. Right behind that of course are going to be Bioware and Obsidian games, because again, they have been focusing on storyline, and again have managed to write characters well enough where the various love interests can remain with the crew convincingly without being in a romance with the main character, showing that they are not entirely one dimensional, with their only purpose being to jump into bed with the main character despite various accusations to the contrary.
Of course at the same time it must be understood that not following the demands of SJW feminism does not diminish a character in the least. It is not badly written, or unrealistic, if say some girl tends to be very girlish and god forbid might have the objective of wanting to settle down and be domestic. Looking at some or the characters from say the "Tales" series it seems that this is the gist of frequent criticisms, that not being entirely assertive, having an attitude and/or wanting simple things is somehow bad writing or offensive. Men rarely get the same criticism oddly enough where it seems some male characters, especially in series like that, would oftentimes be entirely content to just stay in their starting village and be a woodcutter or whatever and marry their childhood sweetheart (which if as often or not the domestic one who wants the same basic thing, and follows the hero just as reluctantly as he is to leave, and represents the most likely or default love interest... being exceptional mainly for it's normality).
As a general rule the various "Damsels In Distress" never struck me as a fair criticism since they oftentimes don't have much of a role within the story, nor does the story really require it. Zelda or "The Delightful Daphne" (that name actually makes me chuckle), might be an objective, but then again that's no more bigoted than say a quest to say recover a macguffin, I mean if your out to say find a magic orb that saves the kingdom that is not in some way offensive or discriminatory against spherical objects... even if the orb talks. What's more, especially nowadays, there have been cases where you have women motivated by saving their families, protecting politicians, and similar things. Where a stereotype might once have existed, the irony is that it had ceased to exist or be relevant before the current SJW mentality existed in this way. We ask questions like the one in this thread largely because the media has promoted the crusades of people trying to fight a battle that was over a decade before they ever considered it... jousting with windmills, yet we're demanded to take them seriously.
