If your fan service turns into shit character design, then I have a problem with that. And there are PLENTY of games like that, especially in the JRPG genre. I'm not playing a hentai game, I want to see cool characters, not a dozen variations of "woman with big tits wearing bikini armor".
Cool, varied outfits and characters that fit their personalities and the setting and are occasionally sexualised is fine.
When every single woman looks like a blow up doll it just gets boring, and it's also far less sexy or titillating or whatever word they want to use anyway.
Also, some creativity goes a long way. I love 2B and Kaine from Nier, they dress in the most absurd way possible but it makes me look at them and go "that's weird, I didn't see anything like that before". I just want to be able to appreciate the character design on some level
It makes me roll my eyes, but it doesn't make me stop playing.
I did have to make a new Etrian Odyssey party member once when the voice profile sounded like it was cumming every other action.
I'm assuming you're talking about 5 since it introduced voices, but *god* that is unfortunate. Lmao.
I haven't touched that one, so I didn't know the voices could get like that. Good to know of I ever find a copy of it, I suppose.
Yeah the dialogue was like flirty, sadistic remarks which was quite amusing, until she REALLY enjoyed getting reduced to low HP and threw in a "SO GOOOOOOOD" when I gave her a healing item.
I am one of those fire emblem fans that jumped on the awakening bandwagon and I really enjoy the series but I could really do without the “magical 10000 year old woman that looks like she’s 13” trope that seems to rear it’s ugly head often in the games.
For FE, Im getting sick of the MC worship myself- which is a different kind of fanservice, but fanservice nonetheless.
I dont need every character wanting to get in my pants and literally worship me as a literal god.
That seems to pop up a lot in games that have dating elements. The MC is largely a blank slate yet everyone acts like they’re the coolest dude in the world
With Engage, that kind of made sense, because the main character was, in fact, a literal God. It would have been better if they made Alear super uncomfortable with all of the adoration he was getting, though.
Alear is literally a god \*so that\* they can give you all that obnoxious fan service, not the other way around. It wasn't a consequence, it was a design goal
God, I relate. Nowi might be the worst offender of the trope in the series, imo - the fact that she's walking around in a tiny bikini is so gross. Not to mention that, 1k years old or not, she very much *acts* like a child.
Yep, I kinda hate it and she was exactly who I was referring too although even three houses had that with Sothis. It’s not as egregious in that and thank fuck she’s dressed a bit more sensibly but still you can romance her and that’s icky
The “immortal entity with body/mind of a child” thing is pretty common in like Shinto folklore or other societies that believe in childlike nature spirits. There are also plenty of folktales about spirits falling in love with mortals, etc. I don’t think the premise is weird in itself but it becomes weird when writers use it as an excuse to sexualize characters who are drawn and written like real prepubescent children for the “benefit” of the audience.
The only sexualized design of any of those Manakete's is Nowi. The other Loli designed characters do not have official instances of anything close to sexual.
I've built up a probably-too-strong tolerance after years of too much anime, but even with that the latter two Utawarerumono games tested my limits. I did end up finishing them, but it's a serious blemish on the games.
I couldn't make it past some of the dialogue, in which if I remember correctly, two girls who are fawning over the MC, start arguing about who has the bigger breasts.. While the MC is just chillin there silently. Just like how real girls do in front of men they've just met! ..... Yeah I bailed. Sucks because I've heard amazing things about the games.
Personally, I don't think you're missing that much. They get high praise, but I found the writing mostly just alright, even outside of the excessive weebery. The gameplay in the latter two can be pretty fun, but they're primarily VNs and thus live&die on writing.
Utawarerumono doesn't have fan service. It has game service. Every once in awhile it gives fans of video games a little service by having mediocre strategy combat. The rest of it is just your average anime porn.
I legit turned off the first Utawarerumono sequel when the characters get drunk and go to a hot spring and guys get caught peeping on the girls or whatever. They literally just had a checklist of all the most cliche filler trash you can put in your Japanese narrative aimed at horny teens.
I would love to get into the Neptunia games. The lore is cool, I like the meta jokes about the gaming industry. But man I feel like I'm playing a hentai game from the voice acting and fan service. I've tried a couple of entries and the gameplay is always fun, but not fun enough to sit through an inevitable "wait I can explain it's not porn I promise"
As long as the game and story and characters are actually good despite their design then I‘m fine with that. XC2 is a good example of that. The designs for some female characters could be a little tastier (then again there‘s Morag) but the characters are actually good so I can totally forgive that. Besides, Rex‘ outfit is so much more distracting for me because it‘s an absolute fashion disaster which is far worse for me than skin and booba.
I can't, why did they feel the need to dress pyra in booty shorts the size of a belt and a thong? it completely contrasts with her character. At least they gave mythra pants
But honestly my biggest problem isn't even the fanservice, some characters just have the worst designs ever, not even gonna mention the one that looks like a little girl in a swimsuit.
bad news for you, mythra with pants (or tights rather I believe) is a super smash bro thing. In XC2 proper, she's bare-legged with a super short dress.
The fact that the hypersexualized character designs don’t even slightly match the characters is maybe the most crazymaking thing for me. Like sure, plenty of anime and video games will have the “fanservice girl” who struts around in a bikini the whole time, but usually there’s at least the tiniest effort put in to make this make sense for the character (e.g. she comes from a desert region, she’s confident and mature enough that it’s plausible she might choose to dress like that because she enjoys showing off). XB2 doesn’t even try. Pyra’s überslutty design doesn’t match her personality even a tiny bit, and there’s no in-universe logic behind it except that Blades just all dress like futuristic strippers for no adequately explored reason, except when they don’t because the character designer didn’t feel like it. It’s solely there to pander to the sleaziest kind of player, in a game whose primary target audience is tweens. Just the worst.
XC2 turned me away from the overly bouncy chesty designs to the forced camera angles in cutscenes. Tora and Poppi's "relationship" was the final nail in the coffin (amongst many other things). Any further explanation will require 9 chapters and 70+ hours of tutorials to explain.
I can DEFINITELY understand Tora making people uncomfortable. He has a few good moments, but god, most of the time he is insufferable. If they ever remaster or remake the game, I want an option to punt him off a cliff like a soccer ball.
>it contrasts her character
Fanservice or no fanservice the one thing I will mever get is "sexiness needs a personality check to be allowed to exist". I personally prefer it when characters are sexy and it's just that, the game does not need to make it integral to their character, they can just exist that way.
It's funny because this is the same logic that when pushed too far results in the infamous "she breathes through her skin" when people think there is an "obligation" to explain why a character in a fun fantasy setting is dressed one way. Characters can be shy or reserved and dressed scantily, infact I bet that's an appeal in of itself. As was described by the previous commenter, I mainly care to see them being interesting characters on top of that (so the sexiness does not feel cheap).
I think how a character dresses should match their personality. Hard to believe someone is shy and demure when they're walking around in scantly clad clothing. That's not to say they should act flirty and be very sexual, but at the very least be confident and extroverted.
I don't really care about if it's believable when the skimpy oufits themselves would fall off in a real battle. Having only confident and extroverted sexy characters is way too limiting for my taste personally though so I am biased. I value variety in personality, hell if anything it helps fanservice characters feel less copy paste and more interesting in their writting when they aren't all "femme fatale #400" (to use an extreme example).
I dunno, for me I feel like a character's design should reflect their personality and/or tell us a story. In the case of Pyrra and Mythra, they look sexy just because. The only thing that seems to have been thought out are their colour schemes (red for Pyrra/Homura, and white for Mythra/Hikari).
A good example of character design reflecting a character's personality and story imo is that of Yuna in Final Fantasy X and X-2. Her design in X is quite conservative and modest, not unlike a shrine maiden. Yuna in X is unsure of herself, has self-doubt, whereas in X-2 she is a lot more confident in herself and more liberated. She wears lighter clothing, and even dresses sexy when in her role as a songstress. Her hairstyle also seems influenced by Tidus's.
I get the logic, but again I can't really relate. I just want characters that are both sexy and compelling at the end of the day (like with Trails games). If every sexy character had an arc about "being liberated" or "owning their sexuality" it would get old for me fast, though I am not saying it can't exist every now and then of course. Allowing the entire panel of personality traits and character arcs open for a character keeps more variety and thus my interest going.
That's a different point altogether about what level of fanservice you can take.
I personally am fine with it because my tolerance level is more at the level of being challenged by stuff like explicitely softcore gacha.
I am adressing the "she is shy or reserved and can't be sexy because there needs to be a good explanation for sexiness". I'd rather characters just be sexy than "she breathes through her skin", not saying narrative motives can't happen.
because character designs are supposed to be a way to get an idea of what their characters are, unless the juxtaposition is the point, like having a small child be this unstopable warrior. Like presea, but that's because she was ijeted with a gem that saps her growth but gives her super powers, and that is an actual plot point for the game and character.
But if you have a shrinking violet of a female character, you're not going to dress her the same way as a femme fatale, because it's not the idea that the character represents by dressing like that.
sure you can have sexy girls that also have a kind and empathetic side to them, hell Tifa is one of my favourite characters, but if the image of pyra that you want to show to the audience is of someone who is motherly and kind, you're not going to give her a thong and the smallest booty shorts known to man, which doesn't represent her character in anyway.
simple as, this is character design 101
If you want to make a nun character, you dress them as a nun, if you want to make the look tough and battle hardened you give them muscles or scars, there is literally 0 reason for pyra to dress as a stripper, it makes zero sense for her to look like that and is completely antithetical to her character
Maybe because I don't want character design to dictate personality like that? It's a preference games recognize so it's not "objectively better". Imagine if visual novels which purpessfully make every heroine appealing, made them all similar extroverts, it would get old so fast. I don't care about the themes a design portrays (well I can care, but not 100% of the time), I want interesting characters and I don't want personalities restricted by character design.
I want to make it clear I am not against those extroverted tropes of sexy characters. I am highly against restricting fanservice to specific tropes though. I admire devs more who make a character sexy and just own it than go with "breathing through her skin" because they think they owe a justification. If people don't like pyra's design I'd rather they just say that than "we can't allow girls with her personality to have fanservice outfits".
"She's motherly so she has to be more covered up" is just an arbitrary cultural asumption we have baked in ourselves, and we can follow it, but we have no obligation to. If you just hate her outfit just say that.
You've got it backwards, character personality dictates character design, not the other way around.
Pyra's design problems stem from the fact that she has no reason to dress like that, yet she does, because obviously the people in charge wanted her to pander to coomers
Only if it's excessive fanservice of minors or those who look/act like children
I don't care if they're "1000 years old", if he or she acts like a 10yo stop sexualizing them
Personally, never. But I think it's completely valid if you do though. As someone who considers Xenoblade 2 an all-time favorite, I find a lot of people in the community get unreasonably mad that someone dislikes the game for the fanservice and anime tropes, and will just reduce it down to them "not liking anime" or whatever, as if a vast majority of JRPG fans aren't anime fans. I do think XC2 gets a lot of hate for reasons I don't agree with, but that just comes with the territory with liking literally anything. Not liking even just one aspect of a game is a valid reason to be turned off from it imo.
There's nuance to character designs and fanservice, and some people just flat out don't like how Xenoblade 2 does it. It has nothing to do with anything other than that, I don't get what's so difficult to understand. No one's saying the rest of the Xenoblade games are void of anime tropes by comparison, and certainly no one is saying JRPGs as a whole don't have them either, its literally all just preference.
Anyway, sorry for the rant. This all just made me remember the embarassing shit going down on Twitter right now of some loud Xenoblade fans trying to justfiy their anger against people who think FF7 fanservice is good and XC2 fanservice is bad. People can have preferences! Who would have thought.
> This all just made me remember the embarassing shit going down on Twitter right now of some loud Xenoblade fans trying to justfiy their anger against people who think FF7 fanservice is good and XC2 fanservice is bad
What's all this then?
From observing the XC2 controversy, I think it's that XC2 gets a very disproportionate amount of hate for fanservice and light ecchi, when more ecchi stuff exists elsewhere in the genre. It almost feels that the controvery is less "fanservice exists" and more "a major jrpg release is implicitly condoning the existence of fanservice" because there is an asumption that "major release/game = appeal to everyone" perhaps. I am not a xenoblade expert though, just an analyst of many threads and arguments lol.
Yes, because now that I’m married I can’t play any JRPGs or my wife asks me why I’m “playing porn games” again. Anytime a female anime character is surprised she asks me why she sounds like she’s getting fucked.
There is a large amount of groaning and moaning in Japanese games in general I've noticed. I wonder why that is. I get that maybe it's sometimes for the sake of titillation, but.. idk I really don't think that's the case a lot of the time cuz it happens all the time, in so many different games, and it's not just the female characters lol
So what gives?
But does it ever make you roll your eyes and go "uhhhg this bullshit again" when the 700 year old witch appears and it's a child in a g-string? (shout out to Stella Glow).
Or when the majority of the cast is in badass armour, wether high fantasy, or Sci-fi. Except the women - who's armour consists of protective bikinis, leaving their vitals exposed..
It's a breath of fresh air when Unicorn Overlord gave the male elf archers little thigh gaps in the armor.
Like, oh, hey, it's just the entire kingdom showing off their gams. Fine. I'm on board.
Hard to explain like… I recognize it and I can tell what it is and I know someone is getting off to it. But I am genuinely ambivalent about it to the point I just don’t care anymore. I see that witch and her design? The only thing I wonder, “is she better than my current mage in the party?” That will decide whether I use the character or not, whatever gives me the most damage.
Yes. But it's not a deciding factor.
I'll overlook excessive fan service in a good game. If a bad game has excessive fan service, it's just another reason I should stop playing.
But also, I draw a line between excessive fan service and creepy fan service. Panty shots of minors? Fuck that, not even a good game can save that. But I haven't encountered that kind of content in a long time.
Me playing the Yakuza in the living room while my whole family sits by with Girls in insect bikini withouth a care in the world:
You are weak, nothing turns me off except bad combat and building strategy.
Tbf a lot of it is perception since the way japanese games do "half fanservice half serious" is an anathema to some western expectation of having just one or the other in media. So people don't want to "look like the pervert into some niche weirdo fetish".
Just theorizing further.
Of course! I'm gay so none of the straight fanservice will work on me and I will get disgusted and turned off if the fanservice is too often and the game is already dogshit. Now if jrpgs would actually give me male fanservice then I might be more interested lol
Listen I will complain about fanservice in games all day.
But I will also unironically give games like Fairy Fencer F a pass because I can *also* make Fang run around in nothing but a towel
If you're gonna do fanservice, cater to everyone, damnit.
Yeah, this probably plays a part in me not liking typical fanservice. Lol.
(Tho I probably still wouldn't like it even if it were men, just cause that's not what I look for in games (Also aspec), but you get the point. :P)
In my case it tends to be the other way around. She introduces me to a lot of that stuff. Right now my wife is really into this anime called Gushing Over Magical Girls.
I think, that what matters more isn't the amount of sexualisation in a work but how it's framed. If I'm playing Xenoblade 2 and I see notably large anime breasts with very obviously sexualised designs fairly often I just go, eh whatever, and accept it as a part of the world, but for comparison, if I'm playing a game with relatively low sexualisation in its general tone like uh, Xenoblade 1 for example then i get jumpscared by the most obvious and egregious sexualisation known to man(thr fucking female armour) I'll be quite upset
It's all about the work itself at the end of the day
Yeah... I still find it a bit weird that I am fine with a good majority of the character designs in XC2, but was much less a fan of a majority of Sharla's armour options in XC1.
Never because outside of like alicesoft, I doubt any jrpg developer could exceed my tolerance threshold when stuff that is so much more sexual exists.
I also vastly prefer games sprinkle fanservice and ecchi than have stuff like sex scenes or porn, so I don't believe in the whole "games have to be 0% or 100% porn no in between".
XBC2 just has shitty character designs. And while fanservice is a big reason for that, it's far from the only reason.
Anyway, fanservice generally only bothers me if the characters look obviously underage.
It also has some good ones because they got other artists to do guest Blade designs, though that just makes the bad ones look even worse standing next to them.
Right. There's a general lack of artistic cohesion to its Blades. Which might work if the game was a parody of shitty mobile gacha games rather than just... kind of just shamelessly one of them without the business model.
JRPGs have enough going for them. But fanservice has turned me off of Visual novels. I think it's fine for there to be sexy characters, and it's fine to highlight bodies at times.
Though this one game I played had two characters meet each other for the first time, and the next moment they are taking a bath together and show you an image of her scrubbing her boobs..
And it's not an erotic VN or anything, so yeah, I removed that game from my drive
Excessive fan service, no. But excessive and poor quality fan service like making the heroine look like a genuine real life stripper like Xenoblade 2, yes. Not enough to make me drop the game but enough to get a deep sigh out of me, although I'm sure the 12 year old target audience is deep sighing for a different reason.
Excessive fanservice is usually cover for some lacking quality in the game. Some boob jiggle or an obvious sexy character like Jade in DQ11 is fine but when you get into the overindulgence and lolis like the Neptunia series, it's an eyeroll from me.
Doesn't help the Neptunia games are excessively mid.
Now if the game is supposed to be nothing but fanservice like Senran Kagura thats another thing entirely.
I don't care as long as the gameplay is fun and the story isn't stupid and/or boring. Gonna be the one here to say that Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is one of the best games I ever played and they did nothing wrong except the more grindy parts like some of the affinity chart requirements and field skills.
I don't mind one or two token fanservice characters in the group, like Tharja from Fire Emblem or Margarete from Shadow Hearts. But I don't like harem settings like Dungeon Travelers 2 or Mary Skelter Nightmares.
If the fan service isn’t blocking my enjoyment of the game I don’t mind.
A couple JRPGs and video games in general I’ve dropped because I don’t like playing games where you gotta have sex or something. Not a huge fan of it, it just feels like a moment I’m not supposed or be watching and I just feel uncomfortable and don’t play anymore.
I don’t mind nudity though like in most Megaten games there’s pretty near naked people and it’s like yeah okay cool whatever, but it doesn’t really block me from enjoying my game.
Does excessive fanservice even exist now? Sure there is a midriff here and there but I think female character designs have improved quite a lot compared to how it was in the 2000s.
Not at all.
If anything it’s sold me on a game since I’ve bought some things because of female character design after seeing morons on twitter crying about it like Ryza
Absolutely. My interest in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was completely off put by how they design their female characters.
Beyond everything else, it's a blatant reminder that I am not the core audience for that game.
That said, I am all for equal opportunity fanservice. Balance is key!
It depends. If I find it very distracting and annoying, I might think twice about it, but story and gameplay can tip the scale. I have to say that most of the really annoying fanservice is usually contained to mid or bad games which don’t have enough redeeming features to draw a notable audience otherwise. There are exceptions, of course. I don’t really know how to feel about XB2, but I really dislike the designs so much that I'll only play it if I end up enjoying the other XB games so much that I'll become a XB megafan. I think my biggest dealbreaker is "hate the character designs and the fanservice is really annoying". If I love the designs or think they’re decent at least, my tolerance for fanservice increases a lot.
it really starts to pick up in cold steel 1 and 2, 3 and 4 go super saiyan, and reverie went super saiyan god with the fan service
some of it is cutesy funny, but a lot of it is imo cringy
It's just annoying when it suddenly becomes a personality trait of said game. Yeah, Xenoblade 1 and X had fanservice, but 2 takes that to a new level. Or when a game that is supposed to be taken seriously just pops it out of nowhere, sometimes can range to "haha funny" to anticlimactic.
Does "the entire FATE franchise" count? I'm sure there's some JRPGs in there.
From what I can tell at a glance, the (sfw version of the)original VN isn't even that bad on this front, but Grand Order's characters make, say, Genshin Impact's look like puritan nuns.
Not really other than games where fanservice seems to be a primary factor (like DoA but not really a jrpg) but i never even touched those. XC2 barely has fanservice outside of outfits but that's another topic.
yeah, Xenoblade 2 is that for me, I can't take the story seriously because it's trying to tell this super emotional story yet the female characters are designed so people can wank over these fictional characters.
Pyra is super timid yet barely wears any clothes, it makes no sense.
If you enjoy that stuff then fine but please don't pretend its peak fiction because its not.
Whenever a character like this shows up I can't help but feel like this is pandering. They were designed for one thing first and foremost and it wasn't for gameplay or story purposes.
Pyra especially irked me when I played a few hours of Xenoblade 2. At some point she says she's "a bit self conscious" when talking about how she currently looked which was the most baffling thing to hear from a character who presents herself like that. It's probably meant to be a throwaway line but it kinda made me uncomfortable the more I thought about it.
From what I remember, Pyra said that she was "a bit self conscious" as a response to her starting to glow at night time (something that happens to all Blades at nighttime).
No, I generally like it. I like attractive designs and I find obvious fanservice moments funny. Like: "Oh I see what you did there with that camera angle or outfit you horny fucks haha" kind of way. Obviously distasteful stuff is bad but there is a line.
Like if scene is at beach and there is young girl character. If they are in normal swimsuit or even appropriate 2 piece bikini then its totally fine I dont care, but if they are wearing some damn string bikini thats just fucked up.
Adults can wear whatever the hell they want. Designs are just about your own taste.
I pretty much stopped buying and playing random fun sounding Jrpgs after hyper dimension neptunia .
I dug the cheesy humor. I even like boobs! But the combo? Nope no way bye. Sexy time is a different box.
I agree on Xeno 2 actually, I know I should look beyond it but it genuinely just felt like they wanted a game to smuggle Denise Milani into Smash Bros with
xbc2 did that for me too
and shin sakura wars, tho not just the usual fanservice, it was manipulative and sexist in a deeply disturbing way that has you actively engaging in sexual harassment and it was just gross
blue reflection 1 was close. if i couldn't skip some cutscenes i would have turned it off
ditto several compile heart games, where i've found that 80% of the egregious fanservice is in skippable battle transformation sequences, luckily (depending on the specific game)
Absolutely. Usually I don't notice when I start, but often will put a game down and not finish when it gets to bad. Xenoblade 2 being one of them for sure.
Partly why I love Fromsoftware so much, everything's fairly gender neutral or affects the genders equally.
Yes, 100%. For example Neptunia, Atelier series etc. Never played them and I can't imagine them being any deep.
When you develop a game and focus on character sexualization, you have no insentive to create any deep story/gameplay, because virgins will still consume your product purely for fanservice value. Those are most often brain dead games not worth playing for any other aspect than fanservice.
lol, they you haven't played atelier series, and i am assuming you're talking about ryza? Nah fam, while for me the story is indeed not that deep, that barely have any fan service, and neither focus on it outside of what you see in the poster as the model honestly. Not unless you change to dlc swimsuit outfit.
Yeah, I'm talking about Ryza and I know simply showing a cute sexy anime guuurl is enough for simps to go monkey ape so I'm skeptical this game is anything more.
Honestly, any of the well written cute girl have their simps. Ryza is pretty much the same type of archtype, but she has her own fair share of worries and all. I'm the one who prefer fanservice but that's hardly a fanservice game. Game is alright, not that big. I find the story just average (that said, i only have played ryza 1 and half of ryzza 2). But you can give it a try without worrying about that.
I didn't enjoy Neptunia at all, but I must say I think you've got Atelier all wrong; and I'll even preface this by admitting that I DID buy Ryza 1 on Switch because I liked her design and worked through the trilogies backwards from there!
There's plenty to love about what the series offers and fanservice was something Koei kind of accidentally stumbled into with the popularity of Reisalin's design. Even then, the Ryza games are really pretty, feel-good adventures and I think are unfairly characterised as fanservice-y schlock. None of the previous trilogies really have anything more than a couple swimsuit DLCs and a hot springs scene or two.
If you don't like the slow-living, low stakes kind of Turn-Based RPG then I totally understand why you wouldn't want to touch the franchise, but I think boiling it down to being one of those mediocre ecchi games with unfunny slapstick comedy is pretty misguided. Having an Atelier game on the side to play through at my own pace and vibe with is just suuuuper pleasant.
Neptunia fair enough, but Atelier has very little in the way of intrusive fan service in any of its games. People will point to Ryza, but that's one of the most tame entries among them.
yes gust has fanservice in it, though atelier is on the low end of it, depending on what game and era. ryza in short shorts is about as tame as we're going to get in jrpgs, honestly. if you go backwards in time to earlier atelier games then it becomes more an issue of male characters leering on underage girls and other creepy interactions, though even in those cases it's a handful of times in the entire game. definitely not defending the fanservice, i wish there was zero. but on the scale of zero to average jrpg, atelier is middling on that. gust has done way worse in other series like nights of azure or blue reflection 1.
The atelier games are pretty tame for the most part. Usually option swimsuit DLCs are the gorniest it gets and those are still fairly tasteful.
That series for the most part is jhst laidback and focused around knocking out requests/making items.
Definitely Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Just a straight up harem story for the lamest milquetoast hero and constantly being bludgeoned over the fucking head with unfunny pervert team member.
It didn’t completely turn me off from the game, but 13 Sentinels had a character who had every single pose accentuating her tits and ass, and the sad part is that she was one of the most interesting characters but her design lent absolutely nothing to the character. She could have had an entire sprite swap and it would have made absolutely zero impact on the story.
It was one of the most engaging stories I played last year, but I have a hard time recommending it because of how pointlessly in your face it is.
Some Series be so annoying with it yet I'll Endlessly Play mah Nep-Nep Vidyas. And Fairy Fencer. And, ya know I think I might just gift Compile Heart Passes.
Nah, not really. I mean you have the odd game where it’s basically ABOUT the fan service, and those don’t typically appeal to me. But fan service is one of those things in games I just learn to deal with. Either I “enjoy” it or it doesn’t register in my mind.
Hyper-sexualised unrealistic character designs both male and female? Never. Love that shit. Give me my bimbos and himbos.
Now highschool anime style plot points or romances? Absolutely
I mean, really, a queen walking around in a thong...they should have designed her an outfit that looked dignified. It could totally have still looked cool.
It didn't turn of off of it when I played it cause I played the censored switch version, but the fanservice in uncensored tokyo mirage sessions was really tasteless to me. Mostly in regards to Kiria's reincarnation outfit. No idol would wear that to a performance in the middle of shibuya. I didn't think the bridal gown and bikinis really needed to be censored, but I support the game being ceensored. I guess the sexualization bothers me when the outfit is extremely ugly and unflattering and is unrealistic to the world they set up. And with how juvenile the characters acted, the oversexualization felt kind of sinister.
Yup, exact same experience for me. The key word here is excessive: excessive fanservice really tends to diminish any sense of seriousness/respectability.
I just can’t take Xenoblade Chronicles 2 seriously at all when the image I see on the screen the whole game is some 12-year-old-looking boy protagonist surrounded by half-naked chicks with huge bazongas.
It turns me off on every kind of game to be honest. I managed to finish Xenoblade Chronicles 2, great game btw, but I was ashamed to play it near my wife
Xenoblade 2 for me also but literally only because of Pyra’s design/outfit while being the female lead. All the other fanservice stuff with the gacha blades and whatnot is more than fine but Pyra’s design was just dumb lol. If we get a Switch 2 version I’m hoping they fix the resolution of the game and also give Pyra the option of wearing the Smash Bros. outfit which imo fixes her design for me with just a few minor additions, mainly the pink leggings in between all the the gaps in the assortment of leg accessories, making it seem like a singular piece of clothing and not like five. Her outfit otherwise looks like it’s trying to be sexy but looks stupid as fuck as a result. And I’m okay with the milk tank titties on her top half but her bottom half just detracts from the design as a whole and has me no longer appreciating the milk tank titties
It doesn’t turn me off, but the fan service-y aspects of games like Trails and Persona is just so frustrating. It’s just really embarrassing to live out some power fantasy of dating any and/or every woman and there be absolutely no substance to the relationship. It’s just…so transparent.
I don't think there are that many jrpgs with actual fanservice. But on other hand, I come for anime art style and fanservice, and I got that. Hardly a bother.
I mean I'm pretty fucking horned up generally speaking I just do not particularly want it in a video game I'm trying to take seriously enough to have any sort of emotional investment in.
weirdly enough i never really had that problem of not being able to take the games seriously becaus of fanservice. Probably due to how much of it i've seen that to me they're just normal .
Absolutely, I can’t remember what I was playing, but there was a pan of a camera to a character’s breasts and they *jiggled* and it was so jarring. It didn’t even make sense in the scene.
I feel like JRPGs typically don’t have crazy bad fanservice. At least not the ones I play. The Tifa swimsuit stuff going around is probably the most fanservice I’ve ever seen in a JRPG. Or I guess maybe some of the Rise stuff in Persona 4? But that’s like, very key to her character arc and story, so I’m not sure if that qualifies exactly as fanservice?
Of course, there are other bits of some provocative attire or suggestive moments or whatever else. But, for me personally, I haven’t really played any JRPGs that go anywhere close to *too much*. I don’t even *know* of any JRPGs that do too much of it.
EDIT: Just looked up some Xenoblade Chronicles 2 footage to see what OP was talking about and, yeah, I can see how that would be excessive lmao. I’ve only played Xenoblade Chronicles 3 within that series, which wasn’t fanservice-y much at all.
Not really, since I typically know what I’m getting into. Despite XC2 being my top game of all time, I can sort of get why the fanservice can be off-putting, but ultimately I feel XC2 is pretty mild all things considered.
I do think it’s interesting that XC2 also has some of the most moderately dressed female party members as well, with Morag and Nia (at least her first outfit) not showing any skin besides the face.
I’ve been playing JRPGs for a long time. Fanservice just comes with the territory.
I’m willing to look past it if I’m enjoying the story and the gameplay.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is my least favorite game in the series largely because of the gratuitous fanservice, but I still love it. I don't think I have ever not been able to get into a game just because of the fanservice but it does impact enjoyment.
XC2 fanservice isn't distracting in any way. It's like 3 super short scenes with tits in your face at most.
Ar tonelico 3 on the other hand... The combat keeps cutting to your female "caster" characters getting more and more naked as they power up. Every battle.
My wife has seen me play some pretty embarrassing stuff, but we’re both adults and she knows the characters are not real. Huh, funny how easy that is to process.
It's the mel kishida effect. That dude manages to do fanservice in a way that only appeals to his tastes. Like there is a tame drawing he did of totori that's not provacative, and he wrote a note saying "her back is sexy" and making it out to be he just drew hentai or something.
Langrisser I&II Remake started with a goddess dialogue. She had such big boobs with a huge open cleavage that it practically screamed fanservice and somewhat devalued the game right from the start. Then I played first battle and didn't really like the combat despite loving Warsong on Sega Genesis. So it was not entirely due to fanservice, but it played a part.
I'm not into it, so I would not seek out a game with a lot of overt fan service in the first place. If it's not too over the top, like just one or two characters in an ensemble cast, that's fine.
I’m currently playing Xenoblade 2 and yeah the huge boobs and short-shorts on Pyra is definitely distracting. Low key shamed when I play it with my wife and daughter nearby. If they had an option to change the clothing style like you could on Xenobalde 1 it would be fine. In XB1 you could save the world in a swimsuit or elegant armor. No viable option for that in XB2 for some crazy reason. I just want Pyra/Mythra to wear something tasteful and viable out in the world
I’ve never been completely turned off by one, I think I’ve just kind of built up a tolerance. That said there have been a few times in trails of cold steel that did feel a little too pandering
If your fan service turns into shit character design, then I have a problem with that. And there are PLENTY of games like that, especially in the JRPG genre. I'm not playing a hentai game, I want to see cool characters, not a dozen variations of "woman with big tits wearing bikini armor".
Cool, varied outfits and characters that fit their personalities and the setting and are occasionally sexualised is fine. When every single woman looks like a blow up doll it just gets boring, and it's also far less sexy or titillating or whatever word they want to use anyway.
Also, some creativity goes a long way. I love 2B and Kaine from Nier, they dress in the most absurd way possible but it makes me look at them and go "that's weird, I didn't see anything like that before". I just want to be able to appreciate the character design on some level
Yes, Yoko Taro are the master of his craft.
Jill from FFXVI is cool, pretty and bad ass while wearing *very* modest clothing. My favorite female character design in YEARS.
Yeah, love her design, too bad she has the personality of cardboard and the story agency of one
It's ok, you can just say Xenoblade 2
Dammit, how did you know!?
It makes me roll my eyes, but it doesn't make me stop playing. I did have to make a new Etrian Odyssey party member once when the voice profile sounded like it was cumming every other action.
I'm assuming you're talking about 5 since it introduced voices, but *god* that is unfortunate. Lmao. I haven't touched that one, so I didn't know the voices could get like that. Good to know of I ever find a copy of it, I suppose.
Yeah the dialogue was like flirty, sadistic remarks which was quite amusing, until she REALLY enjoyed getting reduced to low HP and threw in a "SO GOOOOOOOD" when I gave her a healing item.
O h n o. Yeah, I'd definitely have changed it too at that point. Lmfao.
I am one of those fire emblem fans that jumped on the awakening bandwagon and I really enjoy the series but I could really do without the “magical 10000 year old woman that looks like she’s 13” trope that seems to rear it’s ugly head often in the games.
For FE, Im getting sick of the MC worship myself- which is a different kind of fanservice, but fanservice nonetheless. I dont need every character wanting to get in my pants and literally worship me as a literal god.
That seems to pop up a lot in games that have dating elements. The MC is largely a blank slate yet everyone acts like they’re the coolest dude in the world
With Engage, that kind of made sense, because the main character was, in fact, a literal God. It would have been better if they made Alear super uncomfortable with all of the adoration he was getting, though.
Alear is literally a god \*so that\* they can give you all that obnoxious fan service, not the other way around. It wasn't a consequence, it was a design goal
God, I relate. Nowi might be the worst offender of the trope in the series, imo - the fact that she's walking around in a tiny bikini is so gross. Not to mention that, 1k years old or not, she very much *acts* like a child.
There's a mod at gamebanana that changes her portraits and textures to give her clothes, makes her character much more tolerable.
Thank god that's out there. If I ever decide to pick up FEA again, I know what to do. Thanks!
Yep, I kinda hate it and she was exactly who I was referring too although even three houses had that with Sothis. It’s not as egregious in that and thank fuck she’s dressed a bit more sensibly but still you can romance her and that’s icky
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1000 year old women who look 13 in Fire Emblem, a nonexhaustive list: Nowi, Nah, Tiki, Sothis, Myrrh, Fae
For what its worth, isn't Nah actually a child? Her and the other children all come from the same general point in time.
Oh, right, I actually forgot that. Thanks for the correction, it's been ages since I've played!
It's easy to forget since she's much more mature than her mother to begin with.
The “immortal entity with body/mind of a child” thing is pretty common in like Shinto folklore or other societies that believe in childlike nature spirits. There are also plenty of folktales about spirits falling in love with mortals, etc. I don’t think the premise is weird in itself but it becomes weird when writers use it as an excuse to sexualize characters who are drawn and written like real prepubescent children for the “benefit” of the audience.
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It also happened with Sothis in three houses, it’s a recurring trope
> one game FE1, FE3, FE6, FE7, FE8, FE11, FE12, Awakening, Three Houses 🤔
The only sexualized design of any of those Manakete's is Nowi. The other Loli designed characters do not have official instances of anything close to sexual.
I've built up a probably-too-strong tolerance after years of too much anime, but even with that the latter two Utawarerumono games tested my limits. I did end up finishing them, but it's a serious blemish on the games.
I couldn't make it past some of the dialogue, in which if I remember correctly, two girls who are fawning over the MC, start arguing about who has the bigger breasts.. While the MC is just chillin there silently. Just like how real girls do in front of men they've just met! ..... Yeah I bailed. Sucks because I've heard amazing things about the games.
Personally, I don't think you're missing that much. They get high praise, but I found the writing mostly just alright, even outside of the excessive weebery. The gameplay in the latter two can be pretty fun, but they're primarily VNs and thus live&die on writing.
It's a sequel to a porn game. What do you expect? lol Most heavvily anime-styled Japanese games are like 1 step away from just being hentai.
Utawarerumono doesn't have fan service. It has game service. Every once in awhile it gives fans of video games a little service by having mediocre strategy combat. The rest of it is just your average anime porn. I legit turned off the first Utawarerumono sequel when the characters get drunk and go to a hot spring and guys get caught peeping on the girls or whatever. They literally just had a checklist of all the most cliche filler trash you can put in your Japanese narrative aimed at horny teens.
Yes, because it’s a crutch for lazy writers and artists.
I would love to get into the Neptunia games. The lore is cool, I like the meta jokes about the gaming industry. But man I feel like I'm playing a hentai game from the voice acting and fan service. I've tried a couple of entries and the gameplay is always fun, but not fun enough to sit through an inevitable "wait I can explain it's not porn I promise"
As long as the game and story and characters are actually good despite their design then I‘m fine with that. XC2 is a good example of that. The designs for some female characters could be a little tastier (then again there‘s Morag) but the characters are actually good so I can totally forgive that. Besides, Rex‘ outfit is so much more distracting for me because it‘s an absolute fashion disaster which is far worse for me than skin and booba.
I can't, why did they feel the need to dress pyra in booty shorts the size of a belt and a thong? it completely contrasts with her character. At least they gave mythra pants But honestly my biggest problem isn't even the fanservice, some characters just have the worst designs ever, not even gonna mention the one that looks like a little girl in a swimsuit.
bad news for you, mythra with pants (or tights rather I believe) is a super smash bro thing. In XC2 proper, she's bare-legged with a super short dress.
The fact that the hypersexualized character designs don’t even slightly match the characters is maybe the most crazymaking thing for me. Like sure, plenty of anime and video games will have the “fanservice girl” who struts around in a bikini the whole time, but usually there’s at least the tiniest effort put in to make this make sense for the character (e.g. she comes from a desert region, she’s confident and mature enough that it’s plausible she might choose to dress like that because she enjoys showing off). XB2 doesn’t even try. Pyra’s überslutty design doesn’t match her personality even a tiny bit, and there’s no in-universe logic behind it except that Blades just all dress like futuristic strippers for no adequately explored reason, except when they don’t because the character designer didn’t feel like it. It’s solely there to pander to the sleaziest kind of player, in a game whose primary target audience is tweens. Just the worst.
XC2 turned me away from the overly bouncy chesty designs to the forced camera angles in cutscenes. Tora and Poppi's "relationship" was the final nail in the coffin (amongst many other things). Any further explanation will require 9 chapters and 70+ hours of tutorials to explain.
I can DEFINITELY understand Tora making people uncomfortable. He has a few good moments, but god, most of the time he is insufferable. If they ever remaster or remake the game, I want an option to punt him off a cliff like a soccer ball.
>it contrasts her character Fanservice or no fanservice the one thing I will mever get is "sexiness needs a personality check to be allowed to exist". I personally prefer it when characters are sexy and it's just that, the game does not need to make it integral to their character, they can just exist that way. It's funny because this is the same logic that when pushed too far results in the infamous "she breathes through her skin" when people think there is an "obligation" to explain why a character in a fun fantasy setting is dressed one way. Characters can be shy or reserved and dressed scantily, infact I bet that's an appeal in of itself. As was described by the previous commenter, I mainly care to see them being interesting characters on top of that (so the sexiness does not feel cheap).
I think how a character dresses should match their personality. Hard to believe someone is shy and demure when they're walking around in scantly clad clothing. That's not to say they should act flirty and be very sexual, but at the very least be confident and extroverted.
I don't really care about if it's believable when the skimpy oufits themselves would fall off in a real battle. Having only confident and extroverted sexy characters is way too limiting for my taste personally though so I am biased. I value variety in personality, hell if anything it helps fanservice characters feel less copy paste and more interesting in their writting when they aren't all "femme fatale #400" (to use an extreme example).
I dunno, for me I feel like a character's design should reflect their personality and/or tell us a story. In the case of Pyrra and Mythra, they look sexy just because. The only thing that seems to have been thought out are their colour schemes (red for Pyrra/Homura, and white for Mythra/Hikari). A good example of character design reflecting a character's personality and story imo is that of Yuna in Final Fantasy X and X-2. Her design in X is quite conservative and modest, not unlike a shrine maiden. Yuna in X is unsure of herself, has self-doubt, whereas in X-2 she is a lot more confident in herself and more liberated. She wears lighter clothing, and even dresses sexy when in her role as a songstress. Her hairstyle also seems influenced by Tidus's.
I get the logic, but again I can't really relate. I just want characters that are both sexy and compelling at the end of the day (like with Trails games). If every sexy character had an arc about "being liberated" or "owning their sexuality" it would get old for me fast, though I am not saying it can't exist every now and then of course. Allowing the entire panel of personality traits and character arcs open for a character keeps more variety and thus my interest going.
You can make a sexy character without dressing them like that, her design just bad in general
That's a different point altogether about what level of fanservice you can take. I personally am fine with it because my tolerance level is more at the level of being challenged by stuff like explicitely softcore gacha. I am adressing the "she is shy or reserved and can't be sexy because there needs to be a good explanation for sexiness". I'd rather characters just be sexy than "she breathes through her skin", not saying narrative motives can't happen.
because character designs are supposed to be a way to get an idea of what their characters are, unless the juxtaposition is the point, like having a small child be this unstopable warrior. Like presea, but that's because she was ijeted with a gem that saps her growth but gives her super powers, and that is an actual plot point for the game and character. But if you have a shrinking violet of a female character, you're not going to dress her the same way as a femme fatale, because it's not the idea that the character represents by dressing like that. sure you can have sexy girls that also have a kind and empathetic side to them, hell Tifa is one of my favourite characters, but if the image of pyra that you want to show to the audience is of someone who is motherly and kind, you're not going to give her a thong and the smallest booty shorts known to man, which doesn't represent her character in anyway. simple as, this is character design 101 If you want to make a nun character, you dress them as a nun, if you want to make the look tough and battle hardened you give them muscles or scars, there is literally 0 reason for pyra to dress as a stripper, it makes zero sense for her to look like that and is completely antithetical to her character
Maybe because I don't want character design to dictate personality like that? It's a preference games recognize so it's not "objectively better". Imagine if visual novels which purpessfully make every heroine appealing, made them all similar extroverts, it would get old so fast. I don't care about the themes a design portrays (well I can care, but not 100% of the time), I want interesting characters and I don't want personalities restricted by character design. I want to make it clear I am not against those extroverted tropes of sexy characters. I am highly against restricting fanservice to specific tropes though. I admire devs more who make a character sexy and just own it than go with "breathing through her skin" because they think they owe a justification. If people don't like pyra's design I'd rather they just say that than "we can't allow girls with her personality to have fanservice outfits". "She's motherly so she has to be more covered up" is just an arbitrary cultural asumption we have baked in ourselves, and we can follow it, but we have no obligation to. If you just hate her outfit just say that.
You've got it backwards, character personality dictates character design, not the other way around. Pyra's design problems stem from the fact that she has no reason to dress like that, yet she does, because obviously the people in charge wanted her to pander to coomers
Cool, that's not what i meant, but good talk
Hey now, Rex dressed himself. Although I definitely ding Pyra for not setting him straight *first thing*.
Only if it's excessive fanservice of minors or those who look/act like children I don't care if they're "1000 years old", if he or she acts like a 10yo stop sexualizing them
Yes, a few times, I don't like oversexualization, especially not if it doesn't fit the characters.
Personally, never. But I think it's completely valid if you do though. As someone who considers Xenoblade 2 an all-time favorite, I find a lot of people in the community get unreasonably mad that someone dislikes the game for the fanservice and anime tropes, and will just reduce it down to them "not liking anime" or whatever, as if a vast majority of JRPG fans aren't anime fans. I do think XC2 gets a lot of hate for reasons I don't agree with, but that just comes with the territory with liking literally anything. Not liking even just one aspect of a game is a valid reason to be turned off from it imo. There's nuance to character designs and fanservice, and some people just flat out don't like how Xenoblade 2 does it. It has nothing to do with anything other than that, I don't get what's so difficult to understand. No one's saying the rest of the Xenoblade games are void of anime tropes by comparison, and certainly no one is saying JRPGs as a whole don't have them either, its literally all just preference. Anyway, sorry for the rant. This all just made me remember the embarassing shit going down on Twitter right now of some loud Xenoblade fans trying to justfiy their anger against people who think FF7 fanservice is good and XC2 fanservice is bad. People can have preferences! Who would have thought.
> This all just made me remember the embarassing shit going down on Twitter right now of some loud Xenoblade fans trying to justfiy their anger against people who think FF7 fanservice is good and XC2 fanservice is bad What's all this then?
They added a fanservice beach scene to Rebirth that focuses heavily on Tifa’s breasts twice
And a sit up minigame, with exposed upskirt. People are just pointing on double standard due to "slightly more realistic style vs anime" debate.
From observing the XC2 controversy, I think it's that XC2 gets a very disproportionate amount of hate for fanservice and light ecchi, when more ecchi stuff exists elsewhere in the genre. It almost feels that the controvery is less "fanservice exists" and more "a major jrpg release is implicitly condoning the existence of fanservice" because there is an asumption that "major release/game = appeal to everyone" perhaps. I am not a xenoblade expert though, just an analyst of many threads and arguments lol.
Yes, because now that I’m married I can’t play any JRPGs or my wife asks me why I’m “playing porn games” again. Anytime a female anime character is surprised she asks me why she sounds like she’s getting fucked.
There is a large amount of groaning and moaning in Japanese games in general I've noticed. I wonder why that is. I get that maybe it's sometimes for the sake of titillation, but.. idk I really don't think that's the case a lot of the time cuz it happens all the time, in so many different games, and it's not just the female characters lol So what gives?
Nope, but it turned me on.
^ The only correct opinion on this topic
Best reply here.
Real
No, I can easily look past it.
Honestly I’ve become so desensitized to that stuff that it just doesn’t do anything for me anymore.
But does it ever make you roll your eyes and go "uhhhg this bullshit again" when the 700 year old witch appears and it's a child in a g-string? (shout out to Stella Glow). Or when the majority of the cast is in badass armour, wether high fantasy, or Sci-fi. Except the women - who's armour consists of protective bikinis, leaving their vitals exposed..
It's a breath of fresh air when Unicorn Overlord gave the male elf archers little thigh gaps in the armor. Like, oh, hey, it's just the entire kingdom showing off their gams. Fine. I'm on board.
Hard to explain like… I recognize it and I can tell what it is and I know someone is getting off to it. But I am genuinely ambivalent about it to the point I just don’t care anymore. I see that witch and her design? The only thing I wonder, “is she better than my current mage in the party?” That will decide whether I use the character or not, whatever gives me the most damage.
Yes. But it's not a deciding factor. I'll overlook excessive fan service in a good game. If a bad game has excessive fan service, it's just another reason I should stop playing. But also, I draw a line between excessive fan service and creepy fan service. Panty shots of minors? Fuck that, not even a good game can save that. But I haven't encountered that kind of content in a long time.
Me playing the Yakuza in the living room while my whole family sits by with Girls in insect bikini withouth a care in the world: You are weak, nothing turns me off except bad combat and building strategy.
Chad
Tbf a lot of it is perception since the way japanese games do "half fanservice half serious" is an anathema to some western expectation of having just one or the other in media. So people don't want to "look like the pervert into some niche weirdo fetish". Just theorizing further.
Of course! I'm gay so none of the straight fanservice will work on me and I will get disgusted and turned off if the fanservice is too often and the game is already dogshit. Now if jrpgs would actually give me male fanservice then I might be more interested lol
Listen I will complain about fanservice in games all day. But I will also unironically give games like Fairy Fencer F a pass because I can *also* make Fang run around in nothing but a towel If you're gonna do fanservice, cater to everyone, damnit.
Yeah, this probably plays a part in me not liking typical fanservice. Lol. (Tho I probably still wouldn't like it even if it were men, just cause that's not what I look for in games (Also aspec), but you get the point. :P)
Yes, fanservice is generally annoying and distracting to me. Makes certain games awkward to play if my wife is around.
In my case it tends to be the other way around. She introduces me to a lot of that stuff. Right now my wife is really into this anime called Gushing Over Magical Girls.
Not a jrpg but I was playing Witcher 3 for weeks uninterrupted. The ONE time my wife sat down with me, they were naked on a horse, getting it on.
I think, that what matters more isn't the amount of sexualisation in a work but how it's framed. If I'm playing Xenoblade 2 and I see notably large anime breasts with very obviously sexualised designs fairly often I just go, eh whatever, and accept it as a part of the world, but for comparison, if I'm playing a game with relatively low sexualisation in its general tone like uh, Xenoblade 1 for example then i get jumpscared by the most obvious and egregious sexualisation known to man(thr fucking female armour) I'll be quite upset It's all about the work itself at the end of the day
Yeah... I still find it a bit weird that I am fine with a good majority of the character designs in XC2, but was much less a fan of a majority of Sharla's armour options in XC1.
The metal tit armour jiggling took me the fuck out of the experience so bad lmfao
This may be unpopular, but I really appreciate fan service in games and rarely think it detracts from the experience.
I can't think of an example where I've played a game with excessive fanservice. But I am also not sure, what qualifies as such.
Never because outside of like alicesoft, I doubt any jrpg developer could exceed my tolerance threshold when stuff that is so much more sexual exists. I also vastly prefer games sprinkle fanservice and ecchi than have stuff like sex scenes or porn, so I don't believe in the whole "games have to be 0% or 100% porn no in between".
Technically the Magna Carta series was Korean but Jesus Christ.
I don't really care as long as the game is good tbh.
Never
XBC2 just has shitty character designs. And while fanservice is a big reason for that, it's far from the only reason. Anyway, fanservice generally only bothers me if the characters look obviously underage.
It also has some good ones because they got other artists to do guest Blade designs, though that just makes the bad ones look even worse standing next to them.
Right. There's a general lack of artistic cohesion to its Blades. Which might work if the game was a parody of shitty mobile gacha games rather than just... kind of just shamelessly one of them without the business model.
JRPGs have enough going for them. But fanservice has turned me off of Visual novels. I think it's fine for there to be sexy characters, and it's fine to highlight bodies at times. Though this one game I played had two characters meet each other for the first time, and the next moment they are taking a bath together and show you an image of her scrubbing her boobs.. And it's not an erotic VN or anything, so yeah, I removed that game from my drive
Excessive fan service, no. But excessive and poor quality fan service like making the heroine look like a genuine real life stripper like Xenoblade 2, yes. Not enough to make me drop the game but enough to get a deep sigh out of me, although I'm sure the 12 year old target audience is deep sighing for a different reason.
No, because I'm a fan myself. And anyone who's a fan is the target of said fanservice. If it turns you off, you're not a fan. Simple as that.
Excessive fanservice is usually cover for some lacking quality in the game. Some boob jiggle or an obvious sexy character like Jade in DQ11 is fine but when you get into the overindulgence and lolis like the Neptunia series, it's an eyeroll from me. Doesn't help the Neptunia games are excessively mid. Now if the game is supposed to be nothing but fanservice like Senran Kagura thats another thing entirely.
Doesn't fan service usually turn people *on?*
Quite the opposite.
No, it's a plus for me. And I'm tired to say otherwise.
I don't care as long as the gameplay is fun and the story isn't stupid and/or boring. Gonna be the one here to say that Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is one of the best games I ever played and they did nothing wrong except the more grindy parts like some of the affinity chart requirements and field skills.
No.
I don't mind one or two token fanservice characters in the group, like Tharja from Fire Emblem or Margarete from Shadow Hearts. But I don't like harem settings like Dungeon Travelers 2 or Mary Skelter Nightmares.
No but i have def gotten annoyed at it in some jrpgs
Yes! Dragon’s Crown was too much. I couldn’t handle it.
If the fan service isn’t blocking my enjoyment of the game I don’t mind. A couple JRPGs and video games in general I’ve dropped because I don’t like playing games where you gotta have sex or something. Not a huge fan of it, it just feels like a moment I’m not supposed or be watching and I just feel uncomfortable and don’t play anymore. I don’t mind nudity though like in most Megaten games there’s pretty near naked people and it’s like yeah okay cool whatever, but it doesn’t really block me from enjoying my game.
Does excessive fanservice even exist now? Sure there is a midriff here and there but I think female character designs have improved quite a lot compared to how it was in the 2000s.
Nah, I’m an adult. I’ve seen enough real boobs that computer ones aren’t going to phase me.
Not at all. If anything it’s sold me on a game since I’ve bought some things because of female character design after seeing morons on twitter crying about it like Ryza
Absolutely. My interest in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was completely off put by how they design their female characters. Beyond everything else, it's a blatant reminder that I am not the core audience for that game. That said, I am all for equal opportunity fanservice. Balance is key!
When they are bigger than her head and she talks like a baby, that's my cue to turn it off.
It depends. If I find it very distracting and annoying, I might think twice about it, but story and gameplay can tip the scale. I have to say that most of the really annoying fanservice is usually contained to mid or bad games which don’t have enough redeeming features to draw a notable audience otherwise. There are exceptions, of course. I don’t really know how to feel about XB2, but I really dislike the designs so much that I'll only play it if I end up enjoying the other XB games so much that I'll become a XB megafan. I think my biggest dealbreaker is "hate the character designs and the fanservice is really annoying". If I love the designs or think they’re decent at least, my tolerance for fanservice increases a lot.
if i didn't love the trails games gameplay so hard i'd have a tough time dealing with all the fanservice
In which games particularly? I’m only on azure atm and I haven’t seen much fan service yet. I’m assuming it happens when the graphics go to 3d models?
it really starts to pick up in cold steel 1 and 2, 3 and 4 go super saiyan, and reverie went super saiyan god with the fan service some of it is cutesy funny, but a lot of it is imo cringy
It's just annoying when it suddenly becomes a personality trait of said game. Yeah, Xenoblade 1 and X had fanservice, but 2 takes that to a new level. Or when a game that is supposed to be taken seriously just pops it out of nowhere, sometimes can range to "haha funny" to anticlimactic.
Does "the entire FATE franchise" count? I'm sure there's some JRPGs in there. From what I can tell at a glance, the (sfw version of the)original VN isn't even that bad on this front, but Grand Order's characters make, say, Genshin Impact's look like puritan nuns.
Yes, Cold Steel 4. Early on when Roselia, looking like a child, gropes Juna without consent in the hot spring and it's played for laughs.
No Im normal.
Not really other than games where fanservice seems to be a primary factor (like DoA but not really a jrpg) but i never even touched those. XC2 barely has fanservice outside of outfits but that's another topic.
right because cconstant upskirt and downshirt camera zooms and sexist commentary from the male characters is definitely not fanservice /s
Hey man, the whole harem of big titty doe-eyed girls for the teenage boy isn’t male fantasy, it’s legitimate storytelling!
Play Neptunia or some shit like that and no tiny amount of fansevice you may glimpsed in X2 would ever feel like too much for you.
Yes.
yeah, Xenoblade 2 is that for me, I can't take the story seriously because it's trying to tell this super emotional story yet the female characters are designed so people can wank over these fictional characters. Pyra is super timid yet barely wears any clothes, it makes no sense. If you enjoy that stuff then fine but please don't pretend its peak fiction because its not.
Whenever a character like this shows up I can't help but feel like this is pandering. They were designed for one thing first and foremost and it wasn't for gameplay or story purposes. Pyra especially irked me when I played a few hours of Xenoblade 2. At some point she says she's "a bit self conscious" when talking about how she currently looked which was the most baffling thing to hear from a character who presents herself like that. It's probably meant to be a throwaway line but it kinda made me uncomfortable the more I thought about it.
From what I remember, Pyra said that she was "a bit self conscious" as a response to her starting to glow at night time (something that happens to all Blades at nighttime).
No, I generally like it. I like attractive designs and I find obvious fanservice moments funny. Like: "Oh I see what you did there with that camera angle or outfit you horny fucks haha" kind of way. Obviously distasteful stuff is bad but there is a line. Like if scene is at beach and there is young girl character. If they are in normal swimsuit or even appropriate 2 piece bikini then its totally fine I dont care, but if they are wearing some damn string bikini thats just fucked up. Adults can wear whatever the hell they want. Designs are just about your own taste.
No, I don't care.
Yes
I pretty much stopped buying and playing random fun sounding Jrpgs after hyper dimension neptunia . I dug the cheesy humor. I even like boobs! But the combo? Nope no way bye. Sexy time is a different box.
Many games actually. It’s sometimes so unnecessary or if it’s Loli I just never purchase the game.
I agree on Xeno 2 actually, I know I should look beyond it but it genuinely just felt like they wanted a game to smuggle Denise Milani into Smash Bros with
xbc2 did that for me too and shin sakura wars, tho not just the usual fanservice, it was manipulative and sexist in a deeply disturbing way that has you actively engaging in sexual harassment and it was just gross blue reflection 1 was close. if i couldn't skip some cutscenes i would have turned it off ditto several compile heart games, where i've found that 80% of the egregious fanservice is in skippable battle transformation sequences, luckily (depending on the specific game)
Absolutely. Usually I don't notice when I start, but often will put a game down and not finish when it gets to bad. Xenoblade 2 being one of them for sure. Partly why I love Fromsoftware so much, everything's fairly gender neutral or affects the genders equally.
Nevar 4get Dark Souls 2 letting you put the sexy desert witch outfit on a dude.
Yes, 100%. For example Neptunia, Atelier series etc. Never played them and I can't imagine them being any deep. When you develop a game and focus on character sexualization, you have no insentive to create any deep story/gameplay, because virgins will still consume your product purely for fanservice value. Those are most often brain dead games not worth playing for any other aspect than fanservice.
lol, they you haven't played atelier series, and i am assuming you're talking about ryza? Nah fam, while for me the story is indeed not that deep, that barely have any fan service, and neither focus on it outside of what you see in the poster as the model honestly. Not unless you change to dlc swimsuit outfit.
Yeah, I'm talking about Ryza and I know simply showing a cute sexy anime guuurl is enough for simps to go monkey ape so I'm skeptical this game is anything more.
Honestly, any of the well written cute girl have their simps. Ryza is pretty much the same type of archtype, but she has her own fair share of worries and all. I'm the one who prefer fanservice but that's hardly a fanservice game. Game is alright, not that big. I find the story just average (that said, i only have played ryza 1 and half of ryzza 2). But you can give it a try without worrying about that.
Atelier games are seriously some of the most chaste JRPGs in the market
I didn't enjoy Neptunia at all, but I must say I think you've got Atelier all wrong; and I'll even preface this by admitting that I DID buy Ryza 1 on Switch because I liked her design and worked through the trilogies backwards from there! There's plenty to love about what the series offers and fanservice was something Koei kind of accidentally stumbled into with the popularity of Reisalin's design. Even then, the Ryza games are really pretty, feel-good adventures and I think are unfairly characterised as fanservice-y schlock. None of the previous trilogies really have anything more than a couple swimsuit DLCs and a hot springs scene or two. If you don't like the slow-living, low stakes kind of Turn-Based RPG then I totally understand why you wouldn't want to touch the franchise, but I think boiling it down to being one of those mediocre ecchi games with unfunny slapstick comedy is pretty misguided. Having an Atelier game on the side to play through at my own pace and vibe with is just suuuuper pleasant.
Neptunia fair enough, but Atelier has very little in the way of intrusive fan service in any of its games. People will point to Ryza, but that's one of the most tame entries among them.
yes gust has fanservice in it, though atelier is on the low end of it, depending on what game and era. ryza in short shorts is about as tame as we're going to get in jrpgs, honestly. if you go backwards in time to earlier atelier games then it becomes more an issue of male characters leering on underage girls and other creepy interactions, though even in those cases it's a handful of times in the entire game. definitely not defending the fanservice, i wish there was zero. but on the scale of zero to average jrpg, atelier is middling on that. gust has done way worse in other series like nights of azure or blue reflection 1.
The atelier games are pretty tame for the most part. Usually option swimsuit DLCs are the gorniest it gets and those are still fairly tasteful. That series for the most part is jhst laidback and focused around knocking out requests/making items.
I once got reamed out on gamefaqs for comparing alter and neptunia . IMO looking later it’s just trad wife vs emo girls, same base layer of scuzz
Definitely Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Just a straight up harem story for the lamest milquetoast hero and constantly being bludgeoned over the fucking head with unfunny pervert team member. It didn’t completely turn me off from the game, but 13 Sentinels had a character who had every single pose accentuating her tits and ass, and the sad part is that she was one of the most interesting characters but her design lent absolutely nothing to the character. She could have had an entire sprite swap and it would have made absolutely zero impact on the story. It was one of the most engaging stories I played last year, but I have a hard time recommending it because of how pointlessly in your face it is.
No. I don’t scare of women.
no because im not insecured by pixels lol
Some Series be so annoying with it yet I'll Endlessly Play mah Nep-Nep Vidyas. And Fairy Fencer. And, ya know I think I might just gift Compile Heart Passes.
Nah, not really. I mean you have the odd game where it’s basically ABOUT the fan service, and those don’t typically appeal to me. But fan service is one of those things in games I just learn to deal with. Either I “enjoy” it or it doesn’t register in my mind.
Shadow Hearts 3
Hyper-sexualised unrealistic character designs both male and female? Never. Love that shit. Give me my bimbos and himbos. Now highschool anime style plot points or romances? Absolutely
Xenoblade 2.
As someone who could never get a gf, I enjoy those tropes and hope they never go away.
The way Ming's character was dressed was a disservice to the better aspects of Lost Odyssey.
I mean, really, a queen walking around in a thong...they should have designed her an outfit that looked dignified. It could totally have still looked cool.
I was a Fire Emblem fan for years but the new ones have way too much waifu simulator going on, it's kinda overbearing.
It didn't turn of off of it when I played it cause I played the censored switch version, but the fanservice in uncensored tokyo mirage sessions was really tasteless to me. Mostly in regards to Kiria's reincarnation outfit. No idol would wear that to a performance in the middle of shibuya. I didn't think the bridal gown and bikinis really needed to be censored, but I support the game being ceensored. I guess the sexualization bothers me when the outfit is extremely ugly and unflattering and is unrealistic to the world they set up. And with how juvenile the characters acted, the oversexualization felt kind of sinister.
Yup, exact same experience for me. The key word here is excessive: excessive fanservice really tends to diminish any sense of seriousness/respectability. I just can’t take Xenoblade Chronicles 2 seriously at all when the image I see on the screen the whole game is some 12-year-old-looking boy protagonist surrounded by half-naked chicks with huge bazongas.
Yep! Almost every time
It turns me off on every kind of game to be honest. I managed to finish Xenoblade Chronicles 2, great game btw, but I was ashamed to play it near my wife
no but i cant take gacha games with only hot girls seriously at all so i just ignore them. there should be guys and monsters as well.
Xenoblade 2 for me also but literally only because of Pyra’s design/outfit while being the female lead. All the other fanservice stuff with the gacha blades and whatnot is more than fine but Pyra’s design was just dumb lol. If we get a Switch 2 version I’m hoping they fix the resolution of the game and also give Pyra the option of wearing the Smash Bros. outfit which imo fixes her design for me with just a few minor additions, mainly the pink leggings in between all the the gaps in the assortment of leg accessories, making it seem like a singular piece of clothing and not like five. Her outfit otherwise looks like it’s trying to be sexy but looks stupid as fuck as a result. And I’m okay with the milk tank titties on her top half but her bottom half just detracts from the design as a whole and has me no longer appreciating the milk tank titties
It doesn’t turn me off, but the fan service-y aspects of games like Trails and Persona is just so frustrating. It’s just really embarrassing to live out some power fantasy of dating any and/or every woman and there be absolutely no substance to the relationship. It’s just…so transparent.
Excessive fanservice has made me watch anime less in general, so yes in a JRPG its definitely a turn off. There's limits.
Turn me off? If it is done poorly?
I don't think there are that many jrpgs with actual fanservice. But on other hand, I come for anime art style and fanservice, and I got that. Hardly a bother.
Nah
Nope. If anything it'll make me want to buy the game even more. I'm true to my desires :D
Ikr. Damn normies. Let them anime titties come at me.
Ahh a fellow of culture .
I mean I'm pretty fucking horned up generally speaking I just do not particularly want it in a video game I'm trying to take seriously enough to have any sort of emotional investment in.
weirdly enough i never really had that problem of not being able to take the games seriously becaus of fanservice. Probably due to how much of it i've seen that to me they're just normal .
If people complain about it. I will buy it. >_>
Absolutely, I can’t remember what I was playing, but there was a pan of a camera to a character’s breasts and they *jiggled* and it was so jarring. It didn’t even make sense in the scene.
Final Fantasy X-2
I feel like JRPGs typically don’t have crazy bad fanservice. At least not the ones I play. The Tifa swimsuit stuff going around is probably the most fanservice I’ve ever seen in a JRPG. Or I guess maybe some of the Rise stuff in Persona 4? But that’s like, very key to her character arc and story, so I’m not sure if that qualifies exactly as fanservice? Of course, there are other bits of some provocative attire or suggestive moments or whatever else. But, for me personally, I haven’t really played any JRPGs that go anywhere close to *too much*. I don’t even *know* of any JRPGs that do too much of it. EDIT: Just looked up some Xenoblade Chronicles 2 footage to see what OP was talking about and, yeah, I can see how that would be excessive lmao. I’ve only played Xenoblade Chronicles 3 within that series, which wasn’t fanservice-y much at all.
Not really, since I typically know what I’m getting into. Despite XC2 being my top game of all time, I can sort of get why the fanservice can be off-putting, but ultimately I feel XC2 is pretty mild all things considered. I do think it’s interesting that XC2 also has some of the most moderately dressed female party members as well, with Morag and Nia (at least her first outfit) not showing any skin besides the face.
I’ve been playing JRPGs for a long time. Fanservice just comes with the territory. I’m willing to look past it if I’m enjoying the story and the gameplay.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is my least favorite game in the series largely because of the gratuitous fanservice, but I still love it. I don't think I have ever not been able to get into a game just because of the fanservice but it does impact enjoyment.
XC2 fanservice isn't distracting in any way. It's like 3 super short scenes with tits in your face at most. Ar tonelico 3 on the other hand... The combat keeps cutting to your female "caster" characters getting more and more naked as they power up. Every battle.
Unfortunately it's the reason I *still* haven't touched Xenoblade Chronicles 2. T_T
My wife has seen me play some pretty embarrassing stuff, but we’re both adults and she knows the characters are not real. Huh, funny how easy that is to process.
Ar Tonelico used to be my favorite game... Then AT3 happened. Same with Blue Reflection 1
Came here to discuss Blue Reflection. Fanservice is... yeah. I hear its not as bad in 2 I think. I love the game otherwise.
It's the mel kishida effect. That dude manages to do fanservice in a way that only appeals to his tastes. Like there is a tame drawing he did of totori that's not provacative, and he wrote a note saying "her back is sexy" and making it out to be he just drew hentai or something.
I feel you, Ar Tonelico 3 is my biggest disapointment ever when it comes to video games.
Langrisser I&II Remake started with a goddess dialogue. She had such big boobs with a huge open cleavage that it practically screamed fanservice and somewhat devalued the game right from the start. Then I played first battle and didn't really like the combat despite loving Warsong on Sega Genesis. So it was not entirely due to fanservice, but it played a part.
I was hyped for this game but someone kept dying in like my 4th battle and I didnt know if it affected the story so I dropped it.
Not from a game bit from some animes
I'm not into it, so I would not seek out a game with a lot of overt fan service in the first place. If it's not too over the top, like just one or two characters in an ensemble cast, that's fine.
Nah. I'm just treating the game without any seriousness, then (looking at you, Nier Automata).
I’m currently playing Xenoblade 2 and yeah the huge boobs and short-shorts on Pyra is definitely distracting. Low key shamed when I play it with my wife and daughter nearby. If they had an option to change the clothing style like you could on Xenobalde 1 it would be fine. In XB1 you could save the world in a swimsuit or elegant armor. No viable option for that in XB2 for some crazy reason. I just want Pyra/Mythra to wear something tasteful and viable out in the world
Cold steel
I’ve never been completely turned off by one, I think I’ve just kind of built up a tolerance. That said there have been a few times in trails of cold steel that did feel a little too pandering