Let's go over this.
darthzew said:
Or at least should be. Allow me to explain.
Slight spoilers ahead.
No.
The first and most obvious reason I can give, is that Jennifer Hale is a better voice actor than Mark Meer. She can lend a much stronger humanity and flexibility to her portrayal than Meer ever could. Sure, male Shepard sounds great when he's making heroic lines or threatening people, but he just doesn't cut it on the human side of things. Jennifer Hale pulls off both and shines doing it.
She's probably the best voice actor of all time. Look her up if you want to see what all she's done. It's an impressive list.
I actually never cared much. I'm a male, so I preferred male Shepard.
The second reason is because of the romance with Jacob Taylor in Mass Effect 2. If you get into that, Jacob asks Shepard to share her problems. There are a couple of possible answers, but each of them lend a humanity to the Shepard character that simply isn't present anywhere else. There are other romance plots with emotion, true, but none of them give much of a glimpse into what makes the commander tick.
That's assuming someone wanted to romance Jacob in the first place, so many people don't even know about that. Also, shouldn't you already know how Shepard tick? Shepard is your character, defined by the actions you make. Female Shepard is female, and they like talking about their feelings a lot more than guys do.
I think Commander Shepard should have been female from the beginning. Yeah, Mark Vanderloo is a great model for the standard Shep, but what's there is pretty much a standard RPG cutout character.
Same goes for the female.
And on another argument entirely, I feel like Bioware should have given Jennifer Hale the spotlight here. She's done a lot for Bioware. I'm not saying Bioware did anything wrong, just that it would have cool.
How did they not? She's the female lead in an awesome game. I'm assuiming this is tied into the next one.
And finally, a female protagonist like Shepard would have gone miles for the current big-breasted Lara Croft stereotype prevalent in gaming today. She's exactly what the male character is. It's a powerful argument that video games aren't the sexist things that some people seem to think they are.
I don't want people to think I'm complaining; I'm not. I love Mass Effect. I just think it may have turned out better if they had chosen a female face for the standard Shepard.
Anyway, please, let's discuss this.
Ok. Starting last: Then males would have just picked male Shepard instead. As many people have said, most gamers are male, and males (generally) like being badass dudes.
I don't get what you're getting at. She
is the female protagonist. I do agree that if there was a female on the box art more women would be playing the game, but it would have turned off more men, and men are the vast majority of gamers.
female Shepard is exactly what the male character is, because she quite literally is. The same lines, same actions, everything. It all boils down to who is playing, and as I said before, men wouldn't care, they'd just choose a guy. Most of us, anyway.
