Dragon's Crown Designer Apologizes for Exaggerated Characters

[sonofliber]

and this is why real sexism cant be disscuss in games, every stupid thing is called sexist, instead of you know ,actually calling sexist the under representation of woman on games where they are portrait seriously they call it in games were (CLEARLY IF YOU SPEND 2 FRIGGING MINUTES seeying the art style) they are represented a joke on how they are/were portrait in games/life

 

[Neonit]

Wait a minute, so his drawings were childish, his response (3 dwarves) was childish, but calling him a 14 year old - now that was a piece of mature journalism?

It is an art style, i do not enjoy it, but im 100% sure, that somewhere, there is someone who does.
Seeing how i do not enjoy it, i will not partake in it. But somewhere, there is someone who will.

Why cant people just grow the f* up, and use the ye olde "vote with your wallet" method?
It seems like a lot of people have this feeling in the back of their head, that everything has to appeal to them.

No, it does not.

Frankly, imho, this whole thing shows us AGAIN the state of gaming journalism. It starts to look more and more like the "real life journalism". And i for one, am not happy about it.

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

snip

That last picture... what the fuck am I looking at? Somebody paid money to see that? Somebody paid money to OWN that... thing? Truth is stranger than fiction.

OT: I found the female character designs laughably immature and tasteless, but I still think the artist shouldn't need to apologize for what he's made, especially since the game's not even out yet. Just take some lessons to heart and try to scale the body proportions back maybe a liiittle bit next time. And since absurdly mismatched body proportions seem to be the artist's style, he could fuck with normal character design conventions by, say, making the shoulders on the females ridiculously wide or making their toes the size of bricks. That'd be a curveball, wouldn' it?

Now that I look at these designs, they seem a bit schizophrenic. The Thor-esque bearded guy and the armored knight seem almost like tongue-in-cheek parodies, but the sorceress and the archer remind me of something out of a creepy hentai game.

Holy crap. It took me this long to notice that there's actually a skeleton on the ground in the sorceress picture, and she's holding its skull against her breasts. That image just reached a new level of "WTF?"-ery.

 

[Doom972]

This is getting ridiculous. It's fine if people criticize art, but I don't see why the artist should apologize. If he did this completely voluntarily, he doesn't deserve any respect.

Funny how TF2 starts something, and it eventually ends up being in controversy...

Apparently it's only bad if you make disproportioned females.

 

[K_Dub]

No need for the artist to apologize. Not for his art style at least. He had a theme to work with, and chose to work with it in an exaggerated style. There are zero reasons for him to apologize for his art work.

The dwarf incident on the other hand, yeah. May not have been the most mature way to handle to the situation, but I can't really blame the guy for being upset when Kotaku called him a "14 year-old boy". That being said, I do believe that apology was necessary.

All that being said, I gotta say, the Amazon is my favorite character design. A close second being the dwarf. I just love how ridiculous those two characters look!

 

[Quazimofo]

I saw that Sorceress and just kind of shook my head, but now that I've seen the other characters and how stylized they are, I'm actually ready to defend this design. I haven't read any of the surrounding controversy and I'm not going to comment on that, but if people have that much of a problem with a clearly stylized and exaggerated art style, it's their problem, not the creator's.

I agree wholeheartedly on the artistic integrity of it all (even though the intent is clearly to sexualize the female characters based on their poses in relation to the male characters). If people actually took a moment and looked at every character there would probably be less of an outcry though, since the style is at lest consistent (except for that last male sorcerer guy, he actually looks completely reasonable and kinda cool, and doesn't have absolutely gigantic thighs like EVERY-REAKIN'-ONE ELSE). Though I can see why people would have some of a problem with this. It's a bit unsettling when someone's thighs/biceps/breasts are clearly bigger than their head. It just looks... wrong, and unhealthy, and even a bit painful (at least for the sorceress, cant imagine what that's doing to her back. I guess she probably has a spell for that though.)

 

[anthony87]

Well....this is pretty fucking disgraceful. No way in hell should he have had to apologise to anyone for anything.

 

[gyroscopeboy]

I was too busy staring at the Californian Redwoods she has for thighs to notice her breasts.

 

[GameChanger]

You can shout 'STYLIZED' as loud as you like but it does nothing to address the real issue, that the men are designed to look powerful while the women are designed to be wanked over. I'd probably give this game a pass on the basis that all those images (with the exception of the sorceress) look too grotesque to be titillating for anyone, but I've heard the same bullshit used to defend too much actual sexism and the designer guy is acting like a child besides so I'm not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

You are degenerating yourself, stop playing the white knight here. You haven't even looked at the pictures then. There are 'weak' looking men and 'strong' looking women in that album as well. The proportions are EXAGGERATED, and that's exactly what this guy says. Singling out one piece of his work and blaming him for it is called 'out of context' in most cases.

I don't even get what kind of point you are trying to make. Is it some sort of stand against sexism you are trying to make? Because wow you're doing a great job, go and sit along the rest of the people on the Escapist preaching the choir. You are are not contributing in the slightest to the topic with your inane blabbering.

"The women are designed to be wanked over."

Sounds like a fact people, let's close this thread.

 

[maninahat]

I'm amazed nobody has posted this, yay, means I can be of use in a thread. This is an interesting post from someone somewhere and it makes good sense to me (slight NSFW in the form of Ancient Statues)):

Spoiler: Spoiler'd for size

Sooo...yeah, that's my thought, apologizing for it was kind of silly.

I responded to an argument inspired by that post, elsewhere on the escapist:

Spoiler: Long story short, as interesting a justification as it is for the art style, I don't think it is at all correct.

Spoiler

Art has not changed a bit over the millennia.

That strikes me as dishonest. On a pedantic level, art has clearly changed, in the sense that the mainstream male audiences no longer goes in for Rubenesque females or naked men.

On a less pedantic level, whilst we have always had art that sexualises and exaggerates physical forms, they are far from the only kind of human depictions that exist, which isn't so much in the case with games. Game depictions of females are far less diverse than the contents of an art gallery. Had we a healthy library of alternatives to voluptuous females, then game art could be comparable. Even individual artists provide a range of depictions of women (compare Degas' sketches of dancers - in some, the emphasis is on bare backs and cleavage, in others the emphasis is on postures and gestures), which tends not to be the case in games.

Even if art has not changed, and forms have always been sexualised, that doesn't discredit the complaint being voiced by Kotaku. Historically, art has long been made by men, for men, to suit male tastes. To argue that games are a continuation of art traditions, is an argument that games are a continuation of male orientated, patriarchal conventions, with games made for the benefit of males and with neglect to the females. Supposing you can even find a woman who is attracted to the dwarf muscle men, it is largely a fluke that the woman finds it attractive, rather than a deliberate attempt to reach out to female audience members with a beefcake male character. The new DMC - now that is a rare example of female fan service.

-------------------

I'm assuming this post was inspired by one of the commentators on Kotaku, who tried to justify the depictions of women by suggesting that they are just another reference to classical art. The commentator claims that as certain art pieces in the game are clearly referencing Classical depictions - things like Thor's hammer or the Tower of Babel - the depiction of women are also similarly a benevolent reference to such artworks. I think this is bullshit too.

It would be easy to argue with the premise "all the necromancers in Atlus games are referencing this a statue of a big titted necromancer" by pointing out that all Atlus females have big tits but aren't all necromancers, but I'll confront the on the argument on its own terms. Whilst the warrior's hammer is near identical to the famous, Classical depiction of Thor's hammer, and the ruined arena looks exactly like the iconic depiction of the Tower of Babel, the women look nothing like the relatively obscure, non-Classical sculptures of a nude "necromancers" provided. The Atlus characters aren't bare breasted, their costumes are totally unalike, and there is literally no point of similarity between games and the statue beyond the existence of ample tits - which are hardly rare in the art world. It's a huge stretch to make that connection.

Now if Atlus really were looking for Classical art inspirations for their magically imbued female characters, then their female characters would look nothing like they do now. Magical females are traditionally depicted as hags and witches. The emphasis is on wrinkles and age, rather than sexiness, and that is fairly consistent in Medieval, Renaissance, Raphaelite and Classical artworks. There are plenty of works where magical females are shown as generic, pretty maidens, or in some cases (Medea, Cerces, Morgan Le Fay etc), as attractive, shapely women, but notably, they still wear modest outfits and they don't have absurdly oversized tits. If Atlus purposely ignored the countless depictions of crones and based their art on these sexy women, their characters would be covered up and moderately proportioned.

It seems unlikely that if they were going for art references for their females, they would ignore the ample library of magical female depictions and go for a totally obscure piece of non-Classical art. Even in their male character designs, Atlus' artwork is far more exaggerated than any notable piece of art. The references, like Thor's hammer, are clear but the warrior looks nothing like Thor, Hercules, or any traditionally muscular male. They came up with an original concept for a muscular man. Likewise, I don't see any female figure in popular art who resembles the women. Perhaps the sorceress' staff is a reference to some painting, but she isn't.

As for apologising for something which has caused quite a hubbub...why is that silly? I mean, as an artist, he is free to draw anything he likes, but he isn't free from the consequences of his artistic decisions. The art is made for the benefit of a potential audience, and if he has pissed a portion of that audience off, it wouldn't hurt to apologise to them. It is also worth apologising for the homophobic joke he made too, just out of general decency.

 

[Paradoxrifts]

George Kamitani has nothing to apologise for. End of story.

 

[Lovely Mixture]

Yes you can measure sexuality actually.
As a basic example:

A woman in a mini skirt sitting with her legs crossed.
A woman in a mini skirt sitting with her legs wide apart.

One is overtly sexual. One is not. Can you guess which one is which?

So yes, sexuality CAN be measured.
And when we have a drawing of a woman with her ass up against a pole, which brings up images of strippers and/or phallic inferences, and when she's holding a skeleton up to her bossom in the same way a mother breast feeds a child then yes it is overtly sexual.

My argument came out wrong. I mis-worded myself.
By measurement, I meant "limit."

Why is overt sexuality considered a big no, while some sexuality is ok? You can measure them, but can you measure what is ok?

None of that is in the LEAST WAY relevant to this discussion. I don't care who he is, or what he's done, or anything, what I care about is his artwork in the context of his goal which is:

"I exaggerated the silhouettes of all the masculine features in the male characters, the feminine features in female characters, and the monster-like features in the monsters from many different angles until each had a unique feel to them," (emphasis mine)

Unique feel. Does the Sorceress have a unique feel? No, I'm sorry. It doesn't. Big boobs and big ass ain't unique in the slightest. Do the other females have a unique feel to them? Yes. Do the male characters? Yes. The Sorceress does not. She's a cliche. And maybe in the context of that game a cliche is a suitable choice to help distinguish it from the other characters but that doesn't change the fact it's a cliche. It's been done before, it's not unique, etcetera.

You brought up distinction. So I responded to that and emphasized that he doesn't need to care about his distinction, cause he does what he wants to.

He did what he thought was unique. In terms of sexuality? Yeah they aren't unique, I agree with that. In terms of proportions and silhouette they sort of are (for a modern RPG anyway) cause you can identify their roles without needing them in detail in color whilst retaining his distinctive style.

Like seriously is that the normal response? "oh you don't like naked women so I'm going to draw some gay orgy to satisfy you.". Kinda sad and it misses the point entirely.

It's a humorous response. But if you want a serious response, what would one do? Say: "Ok sorry my characters don't appeal to you."

If the "point" is "I think these characters are too sexual." Then what more can be said? "Ok, well I like drawing them that way."