Lady gamers, I'm curious about something

[Jeivar]

Who are your favourite female characters in video games? And why?

A while back I asked about people's favourite opposite-gender characters, and it occurred to me to ask a related question.

[Terraoblivion]

Hmmm, good question.

It's probably Tezuka Rin from Katawa Shoujo. Her problems and her characterization just hit me really hard and struck home and I felt that for the first time ever somebody wrote a character who was truly experiencing the same things as me. Her route was, due to her characterization and the themes in it, the single most powerful artistic experience I've ever had and I cannot choose anybody else over it. Most of the other girls are also great and I love them, but Rin is the one that truly stands out for the personal connection. The rest are all well-written, nuanced and realistic even in the sillier moments and while I can't relate to them on quite as personal a level, I can still relate to them as representations of humans

From other VNs *Mute from Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus stands. She's a very complex character with many layers of trying to balance her own desires, moral urges and programming with what the society she lived in for centuries taught her about how the world works, making her a greatly sympathetic character despite holding some really awful views. That kind of narrative complexity and ability to transcend common litmus tests of how sympathetic a character is needs to be recognized for the good writing that it is. *Hyun-Ae, also from that pair of games stands out for largely similar reasons as well as for how her relationship with *Mute develops, she's just the slightly less interesting of the two.

For characters from more traditional, mainstream games that aren't VNs it gets trickier, but I'll say something that's probably pretty cliché for a female gamer. Lightning is my favorite character from traditional games, though only based on the original Final Fantasy XIII rather than its two sequels. There's some real dramatic meat in her background as somebody who had to grow up too fast to take care of her sister and who hasn't really learned proper social skills as part of it. The real credit goes to the animators and Ali Hillis for really showing all the nuances of emotion that are never called out explicitly in the writing. Her lines might often be cliché, though they aren't always, but the subtle, realistic facial expressions and the quality of the voice acting gives them far more complexity than the writing itself assumes. Also, she's just plain badass and looks awesome. I can have some shallow judgements too.

[GolemsVoice]

I don't know anything about Rin, do you mind telling me a little bit about her?

[Terraoblivion]

She's a lonely, introverted artist who has trouble connecting to people and desperately tries, but people keep imputing their own thoughts on her. It's less about her artistic genius or her complaining about not being understood, it's more about how no person can ever truly understand another, but that shouldn't stop you from trying. Also, it does a good job of showing that not only is it true that people don't understand her, it does a good job of showing why she really is different enough from other people to be hard to understand. So basically her story is about loneliness, the gulf of understanding between people and the limitations of your ability to express yourself or even know what to express.