Much of the pre-release discussion of Stellar Blade has revolved around the appearance of its protagonist, Eve. After finishing the game and writing my Stellar Blade review, I expect the post-release discourse to be more of the same. So here I am, discoursing.
Stellar Blade has become a new stage for an old debate. It's been held up as a game for "men of culture," a throwback to a time when games were brave and sexy, as determined by a vocal crowd that seems hellbent on ignoring how sexy games currently are and have been. This year alone has seen Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Granblue Fantasy: Relink, and the first build of Hades 2 – a mere handful of the latest, amazingly sexy games. Stellar Blade is just louder about its sex appeal, and part of the audience that its approach has attracted has in turn loudly trumpeted it as the superior way.
Some people explicitly want Stellar Blade to be a gallery of shiny hineys, while others are put off by the bizarre masculine chest-beating over Eve's design and have dismissed her as senseless, backward titillation. Having played the whole game, and quite enjoyed it both despite and sometimes because of Eve's design, I think both extremes miss what's good and bad here. It's fine to make characters sexy for the sake of sexiness, and it's fine to like Stellar Blade regardless of this whole debate. I like it! People like to see, and to create, attractive characters. And it would be a shame to reduce Stellar Blade's visual identity to "The Ass Game," because some environmental artists really flexed here.
I don't want to just both-sides this into mush. There's been a lot of deserved talk about the male gaze and the part it played in how Eve looks. As someone with a lot of experience unlearning that same male gaze, I have an editor-scaring amount of thoughts on how Stellar Blade fails Eve, why I actually like her core design, and why I expect plenty of people to feel a similarly neutral way once everyone can actually play this game. To explain all this, I am forced to once again break out my greatest superpower: asexuality.
She's sexy but doesn't know it
This article is not about me, but I should explain where I'm coming from. For me, romantic and sexual attraction are not only foreign but utterly undesirable. So more than with your average person, games like Stellar Blade bark up the wrong tree when they assume that I, as a man, am eager to gawk at and fantasize about characters like Eve. She's hot! I like her! I'd consider myself sex-positive, but I truly, from the pit of my gut, do not care. I'm not put off by Stellar Blade's ham-handed sexiness or its assumptions about me, but I am sensitive to and critical of tone in storytelling, and Eve's treatment undeniably hurts the game's voice.
The problem is not that Eve is sexy. There's nothing wrong with her body. She's not a walking trope built like a snake that swallowed some melons. Her body is based on a scan of a real person so her figure is demonstrably realistic, even if some outfits inexplicably move her navel around or add 50% more ass onto a woman who's already trying to fit 20 pounds of ass into 10 pounds of pants. She also jiggles like a bag of pudding nailed to the wall of a moving train, but what did we all expect from the developers of Nikke?
I like loads of details in Eve's design. She has incredible brows and lashes. I love the little baby hairs by her ears, the subtly imperfect texturing of her skin, and the pores on her cheeks. I love that she has some natural belly fat while being slim. She's a great-looking character, and it's genuinely fun to put her in the many outfits, accessories, and hairstyles that Stellar Blade offers, some of which are plenty fashionable. I mean, of course it is; customizing characters is a video game staple. For my money, Eve is sexier and cooler in outfits that actually have enough material to embellish and accentuate her. She absolutely rocks a leather jacket and jeans, and that's just the start.
The problem is that Eve's sexiness is totally divorced from the rest of the game and her personality, and Stellar Blade wants to be taken seriously despite how strangely this comes across. I think this is why a lot of people don't like how Eve looks. Characters like Bayonetta own and flaunt their sexiness, and games like Hades are inextricably sexy from corner to corner. That's partly why they're so beloved – this stuff is hard to pull off convincingly, and memorable when done well. Everyone being horny in, and for, Baldur's Gate 3 comes to mind. But Eve's amped-up sexiness is a weird outlier. She has next to no interest in her own appearance or sex appeal. At most, she mentions her hairstyle one time.
It becomes a matter of agency. Eve herself doesn't show off her body; the camera lingers on it, with a habit of overtly putting her butt front and center. Eve would never choose to wear the game's more revealing getups – the bunny girl, the bikini, the other bunny girl, the other bikini. Some outfits look great from the front, but then you spin the camera around and find a skirt or leotard hiked so far up Eve's ass that you'd need pliers to get it out. There is none of Eve in this. She can only be forced to wear these outfits by the player. I avoided them not just because I thought they looked stupid, but because they felt wrong and out of place in an immersion-breaking kind of way.
Even Eve's original outfit, the very first thing she puts on after emerging near-naked in the game's so-called skin suit, doesn't seem to fully fit her. If I was a battle-ready woman heading out to fight monsters, my suit-up checklist would not include vacuum-sealing my boobs or bedazzling my groin. The look doesn't match. This stuff exists outside the context of the game's world as something artificial for the viewer's enjoyment, so it disrupts that world. It doesn't ruin the experience, or at least it didn't for me, but it is jarring.
Make sexy make sense
This isn't limited to Eve, either. Male lead Adam is conspicuously covered-up – and has one of the best character designs overall – but the base skin for Lily, a younger-looking girl from a different squad than Eve, is an open top with a bikini underneath. Despite her more petite figure, she jiggles just as absurdly as Eve. Lily is written as a tomboyish engineer, and I think she looks much better in the alternate outfit with a big poncho and light gear like knee pads, which to me highlights another problem with Stellar Blade's presentation and its narrow interpretation of sexiness.
Sensible, stylish outfits exist, but unfitting sexiness is the default and most common option. Yet the game makes it abundantly clear that these outfits are not appropriate for the circumstances. So if we're going to add them anyway just for the players who do want to see them, why make them the default? Why not position these outfits as the silly, optional choices that they are? The characters would look sharper up-front, and the people who like the sexier bits could still knock themselves out. You can just as easily say, "I like the sexy look, why don't you just wear the less-revealing ones?" That is what I did in my playthrough, and it's good that option exists, but the priorities feel odd for an otherwise straight-faced action-adventure game.
There's nothing inherently wrong with liking these outfits, or with games having this material in it. I just wish the developers had gone all-in and made more sexy stuff that actually looks good on Eve, something she would feasibly wear. Hades 2's Aphrodite "wears" a few strands of her own hair and nothing else, but is less vulgar than Eve in a bikini that's clearly not right for her. I don't want less or censored smut; I want thoughtful smut. Sexual themes don't have to be taboo, and shouldn't be, but they don't have to be dumb either.
I try to picture Eve in a climactic cutscene, wearing an outfit that's nearly lingerie, and my brain just shorts out. My favorite moments with Eve were her interactions with side quest characters, including several young girls for whom she clumsily but earnestly assumes a big sister-type role. Characters like the scrap merchant Kaya are adorably excited to talk to Eve and starstruck to receive her help. These moments and conversations are a big part of what little characterization Eve receives, and I don't think it's controversial to say it would be weird for Eve to be in a bikini during them.
The game's serious and sexy sides are fine in isolation, but don't mesh. There's irrevocable conflict between the way Eve is portrayed and the way she is written. This weakens her as a character and displaces the tone of the story, and it's a missed opportunity.
Stellar Blade director "grew up too poor to afford" a PS1, but when he finally got one in college, Ridge Racer and Final Fantasy inspired him to make games.
