Women are all the rage these days. Or maybe women are all full of rage these days, I forget which. Whatever the case it seems like the demands for more and better female characters in games is growing louder. So loud that it can’t just be written off as tumblr on a rampage and will be addressed over the course of the next few years. Or if video games are like movies then things will only APPEAR to be addressed and in fact won’t change at all! But that’s a discussion for another time and isn’t really all that related to video games which I am ordered to discuss under threat of screwdriver-related torture. So in a vain attempt to show how not-sexist I am I would like to rattle off a few female video game characters that I liked, followed next week by some that I hated. Also since I’ve already covered what’s great about Bayonetta repeatedly I will leave her out of this list. I’ve spent enough time smooching her ass.

 

• Princess Rosella “Kings Quest 4: The Perils of Rosella”

The house I grew up in failed to teach me proper gender roles by teaching me that dad did the cooking, cleaning and laundry, while mom couldn’t cook but did things like handle the money and build the garage and kitchen herself by hand. Dad’s interest in technology ended with the telephone so it was ma who brought me to the world of video games and one of the first was one that starred a woman, and a princess at that! We’d already played some other Kings Quest games and the format of typing in commands and punishing the player by brutally murdering your character if you screwed up which was often, mom apparently wanted to teach us that life was harsh and cruel at the drop of a hat or spelling error. For the most part though, the game didn’t treat its first female protagonist much different than previous ones. Looking back there was one strange moment. Throughout the game you are tasked to complete some smaller quests by the antagonist who also had what she claimed was her son, a green-skinned prince who had taken a fancy to you and blushed whenever you were near. After completing all her quests she “rewards” you by trapping you in the castle and forcing you to marry him. If you don’t escape you die when he kisses you, cementing my fear of kissing to this day. But if you do figure out how to escape and take down the evil queen you win the game. And at the end it is revealed that the blushing, green-skinned prince who has a thing for you wasn’t really the evil lady’s son, but was someone else’s son who was still a blushing, white skinned prince who had a thing for you. And even as he pours his heart out to you and thanking you for freeing him, Rosella turns him down saying she wasn’t ready for such a relationship and she returns home. This story would eventually come back in the seventh Kings Quest game years later. But it was still an interesting thing for a game to do. Rosella, after her harrowing quest of danger and self discovery, makes her own damn decision and rejects the Disney fairytale ending until she’s damn well ready for it.

• Lt. Joanna Johnston and Samus Aran “Thexder 2: Firehawk and most of the Metroid Series respectively”

I thought I’d combine these two because they are essentially the same character except I didn’t play Metroid until years later and I played Thexder 2 when I was 4. Both games feature a female protagonist that you don’t really know that you are controlling until the very end of the game, or in Thexder 2’s case if you read the manual. Either way, like Samus, it doesn’t really matter what gender she is because the games are solid and well made, and it serves to show that women can star in whatever genre developers want. I guess the only problem here is their genders are almost kept secret, although in Metroid’s case pretty much everyone knows Samus is a girl at this point. Samus will also return in my article next week about the crappiest female characters. Before you panic or start writing your angry retort, know that it involves “Other M.”

• Joanna Dark “Perfect Dark 64″

Two Joanna’s in one list? What are the odds? Perfect Dark took what Rare learned from making Goldeneye 64 and improved it tenfold. It was the source of hours of multiplayer gameplay for me and my friends and family thanks to its freedom and variety of weapons. We did it all, covered each other with remote mines and run at each other, perfected the extremely annoying skill at the sedative gun and slapper mode, piloted slow moving rockets into people. It was glorious. But the game did have a really great single player mode too with a bizarre story about spies and aliens starring Joanna Dark, a semi-futuristic girl James Bond who put the Bond from Goldeneye 64 to shame. Joanna was great and stood out partially because her voice actress was significantly more capable than all the others in the game. Oh yeah and like Samus before her she was tough, kicked ass and was just as capable at being a video game hero as the best of them. Sadly the game didn’t really stand the test of time since people discovered that 2 joysticks work better than one in FPS games, and both were inferior to the mouse and keyboard. That and they made a sub-par prequel years later called Perfect Dark Zero that just wasn’t the same. Shame really since the potential for a lady spy game franchise was there. At least we have No One Lives Forever which has 2 great games in its series that desperately need to be brought back, or at least given a proper re-release on Steam or GoG.

• Female Commander Shepard “The Mass Effect Series”

You probably expected me to kick around Bioware and frankly they do deserve to be in next week’s followup to this but even I can see the good in something sometimes. I still think that Jennifer Hale did a better job than Mark Meer in voicing Shepard in Mass Effect, especially the renegade lines so you owe it to yourself if you are one of the remaining fans of theirs to give Femshep a play through if you haven’t already. But the reason Femshep is on this list is because of Mass Effect 2. If you play through the game as Male Shepard you get a Captain Kirk-esque feeling as you peel across the galaxy screwing hot alien babes and wiping your posterior with the rule book chapters regarding fraternization between ranks and subordinates. You are a sexual dynamo and who would be foolish enough to turn down Commander Shepard? No one that’s who! Femshep can do this too to be fair but the way its initiated with your crew-members happens slightly differently. If you want to advance the story for the characters you have to talk to them, and generally be nice to them. But by being even remotely nice to them they also start hitting on you and triggering the game’s romantic side quests. This can happen with multiple characters at the same time which will lead to you being forced to awkwardly turn someone down and getting a flustered response. Truly Mass Effect taught me what it is like to be a woman because of this. I was left with no choice but to friend zone the other characters and it left me feeling awkward, uncomfortable, and wishing they had included a way to interact with your crew-members WITHOUT them becoming attracted to you. Lesson learned and now I am an unquestionable expert on all female affairs.

These are just a few really. Girls can make great protagonists for games if they are given a chance and some effort on the writer and developers part. And really it all boils down to the gameplay. If you get solid gameplay nailed down then you can have the game star literally anyone. Except maybe Hitler. Tune in next week for gaming’s crappiest female protagonists!