Top Eleven: Video Game Women Teenage Erik Would've Shelled Out Money For A Game Just To See Them In It

Damn you, C.P.  You know who you are.

In my last top eleven, I discussed female characters that I found to be great in video games.  Some had some issues (Juliet Starling is by no means perfect, I've said several times before), and some were quite solid, but I really thought each one had something that made them special in a form of media that can either leave a women to simply be so much eye candy, to be regulated to a maternal/healer type, or simply have it be the princess waiting to be rescued.

But apparently that's not enough for some people.  Some people apparently want to see just how low I can bring myself down and turn on that base part of the human brain that thought that USA Up All Night and late-night Cinemax were the greatest inventions mankind ever created.  The part of my brain that thought the picture of Teri Hatcher wearing nothing but a Superman cape wrapped around her was the pinnacle of art.  The part of my brain that was actually willing to give Melrose Place a chance because, the first time I accidentally channel surfed past it, Josie Bissett took her shirt off.

(That one didn't last long.  ...at least, not the first time I figured I'd try watching.  Now, when Laura Leighton joined the cast, I stuck around for a few more episodes)

In other words, they want me to act like a teenager again.  That sound you hear is teenage me trying to go Superboy Prime  and high-five me through time and space.

So here it is, the top eleven characters that, if I had the money at the time and/or could sneak it into the house, I probably would've bought the game just to see these women.

...I'm going to feel so dirty after this.



Okay, first off, I'm going to list the games and characters I'm not putting on this list:

Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball - I've discussed this game before, and I still take issue with the fact that the game developers felt it was better to simply put "?" for a character's age when you're trying to get them into smaller and smaller thong bikinis instead of simply bumping up the age a bit to make sure everybody's legal.  I guess I should mention they made jiggle physics so each breast can move independent of the other one, though.

Tomb Raider - I don't know what it was, but back when Lara Croft had giant polygon-shaped breasts, I just didn't find her that attractive.

Night Trap - While I was intrigued, slightly, by a game that featured Dana Plato and a bunch of other actresses whose names are probably now irrelevant running around in their underwear being stalked by really terribly-acted vampire monsters, everything I heard said it was terrible.  Plus, RIP Dana Plato.  I loved you on Diff'rent Strokes.

I guess I should also put my two runners up here:

Runner Up #1:  Ivy from SoulCalibur

 

Ivy, to be fair, is one of the poster women for crass sexualization in games as her breasts continue to swell with each game and her outfit gets tinier.  I'll be honest, though, this woman scares me.  First off, breasts like that aren't possible, and I'm pretty sure each one is larger than her head.  I never found Anna Nicole Smith that attractive, and she looks modest next to you, Ivy.  Go away and take your freaky bondage queen get-up with you.

 Runner Up #2:  B. Jenet from King of Fighters

 

I am seriously kicking myself right now for forgetting to put her on my list of best pirates.  There are no words for just how angry I am that I put friggin REN ahead of her.  She would easily be my number twelve choice, but there's one character from King of Fighters who, in terms of being pure eye candy for horny teenagers, just blows her out of the water.

No pun intended.

So, here's my actual top eleven!  Once you're done reading, I'll be over in the corner having a stiff drink and feeling ashamed.

#11.  Sophitia from SoulCalibur

Before I focus on this character, I want you all to see what she looked like when she first appeared on the scene:

Cute, huh?  I actually missed the boat originally on Soul Edge and SoulCalibur, instead discovering this character at the arcade with SoulCalibur 2.  Here's what she looked like then.

Okay, a bit more breezy for summer, not too bad...

So let's look at SoulCalibur IV

Damn.

I'll admit, there are more sexualized women in this game series (lookin' at you, Ivy) from day one, but Sophitia is unique in that she's the one character who was not only (at first) gorgeous and (later) smoking hot to play as, but was one of the few characters I could reliably win with.  Yet, I have the nagging feeling that anybody who saw me playing the game making a stacked blond woman swing her arms up into the air in that outfit would have a hard time understanding that it's actually a strategy to knock people out of the ring.

She's low on the list because she didn't start ridiculous, but I still somehow hold part of that "small village girl tasked by a god to win" innocence to the character.  It's like when you have a really good friend who has a little sister that you used to tease, and one day years later you bump into her and she's Kate Upton.



10.  Miss Spencer from Rumble Roses

This game is shameless, and it's proud of it.  Much like the above-mentioned volleyball game, it revels in titillation and showing off  (almost) everything it can without resorting to full-on nudity (at least, none I ever saw).  Now, those of you who read my list of interesting women know that I have a particular fondness for Quistis from Final Fantasy VIII.  So when I noticed this character, the similarity to Quistis was pretty hard to ignore.

 A schoolteacher who joins the tournament to convince one of her most rowdy students (aged 18, I checked), "Miss Spencer" managed to seem like she had a touch of class to go along with her ability to slam other attractive women onto mats.  Then I realized that every character in this game has their polar opposite self (either a "baby face" or "heel").  Miss Spencer becomes "Mistress Spencer" and dons a dominatrix costume.  I can't make this up.  And no, I'm not going to post those pictures.

But speaking as someone who had some pretty serious crushes on a couple of teachers through high school and into college...I again say damn.

So, two blonds in a row, guess I better change it up before people decide I have a "type."

9.  Dark Queen

We're going back a bit here, all the way to 1991!

So, uh, yeah.  This game was one I probably could have got, if I asked, because in 1991 there wasn't really any kind of rating system for games that I remember.

Battletoads holds a fond place in my memory in that it was one of the first (and only) games I ever played that actually let you play from a second person point of view during one boss fight.  It was also a constant source of frustration because I died really quickly.

However, even at age eleven I'd always pause a bit when the Dark Queen came up on the screen.  Maybe it's the fact that she obviously broke her back at some point and that's why she's angry, maybe it's because she was what G.I. Joe obviously wanted the Baroness to be but couldn't get away with it in a kids cartoon (because they weren't trying hard enough).  Either way, if she had been on the game box cover, it would still be the single best selling game of all time.

And let's be honest, Battletoads is due for a remake, and what guy wouldn't want to see this woman rendered in top of the line CG graphics?

8.  Aya from OneeChanbara

 That's one sexy, sexy cowboy hat.

...oh, right.  Anyway.  So, I never played this game.  You're a young woman with a cursed heritage who fights zombies.  If enough blood spatters on you, the curse kicks in and you go into a crazed blood lust and kill things around you faster.  The only reasoning I can think of to wear this costume into battle is because you want as much blood to land on you as possible so you can kill things faster and faster.

The teenage side of my brain just sees 1) bikini, 2) cowboy hat to separate her from other video game girls in bikinis, 3) swords.

7. Kaileena from the Prince of Persia series

Confession time, I didn't play the Prince of Persia games for a long time after they came out.  I kept hearing how brilliant they were, and they sounded fun, but I was pretty deep in playing any RPG I could get my hands on during that time, and couldn't be bothered.

Later on, I found out this character from the games was based on (and voiced by) Monica Bellucci, who you might remember as being the only interesting thing to look at in the Matrix trilogy after the first film ended.

I'll admit, the biggest crushes I ever had have been on women (girls, back in my high school days) who had something exotic or unique to them.  A touch of an accent, an interesting heritage, a foreign language I had no knowledge of, a different faith system, it just seemed to add something extra-special to someone who, to me, seemed already remarkable.

So, a woman who's a queen of an Arabian kingdom who is physically built to resemble a woman who, I'll go ahead and say, is one of the most beautiful women who ever lived?  Yeah, that other noise you hear is teenage me calling the me of the 2000s a royal idiot for putting these games off so long.

6.  Morrigan from Darkstalkers

Yeah, this one's a given.

 

Released in 1994, Morrigan was one of the most blatantly sexual video game characters to arrive on the scene.  An actual demonic succubus in a fighting game starring monsters, her move list in later games even included a move called "sexual embrace" (which wasn't really sexual, since it involved her slamming you into the ground from the air).  She wasn't really on my radar at the time, since I think that at that age I was a bit put off by the aggressive sexuality of the character (and that whole "you'd be dead before being able to enjoy any of it" thing is a bit of a mood killer).   To be honest, I was more interested in our number 5 spot.

5.  Mai Shiranui from Fatal Fury and King of Fighters

Again, I want to show you some original art from when this character appeared on the scene:

See the female ninja on the right?  That's Mai.  A bit skinny, perhaps not the best outfit to wear in a fighting tournament, but it was cheap pixelated graphics anyway, so who cares?  It's not like these characters would still be showing up in games coming now now, right?

Again.  Damn.

See, I never played these games when I was in my teens, otherwise I would've become a fan of them much, much earlier (not that I was a fan because of the cheesecake, but I didn't completely suck at it.  No, seriously).  Something to note is that when the graphics got an upgrade for the King of Fighters series, Mai's chest actually bounced as she stood in place.  Up and down, up and down, and up and down.  She's a skilled combatant and one of the longest-lasting women in fighting games, but I'm still not sure how that outfit stays on without massive amounts of tape.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention, this character also has some of the most gorgeous women dressing up as her at conventions.  At some point, I really need to find a cosplayer who dresses like this and get the inside scoop on that, since from what I hear comic and game conventions are some of the most misogynistic, harassing, and crude places outside of X-Box Live.

4.  Princess Daphne from Dragon's Lair

Okay, this might be the oldest woman on this list, since her game goes back to 1983 and the laserdisc.  It's also one of the only three games to be on permanent display in the Smithsonian, so it must be doing something right, right?

Yowza.

One of the original "damsels in distress," I was never really sure if Daphne was wearing this outfit before being captured by a giant dragon, or if the dragon somehow thought this outfit was more fitting for a woman who would probably wind up being lunch at some point.

Oh, notice the animation style there?  That's Don Bluth, who you might recognize from An American Tail, The Land Before Time, and one of my personal favorites, The Secret of Nimh.

Not too long ago, they actually made a comic book adaptation of Dragon's Lair,  and it actually managed to sexualize Daphne even more, since a magic spell made her (and a group of similarly scantily clad women) slowly lose their intelligence until they were giggly, man-crazy ditzes.

...I need to go watch Secret of Nimh again to see a female character done right.  How many are left?  4?  Okay, I can do this.

...god bless sheer fabric, though.

3.  Christie Monteiro from the Tekken series

I'll just be honest, I think Christie here might be one of the most beautiful women ever created with a computer.  ...unless we're counting Vanessa Angel in the Weird Science TV series.

A skilled Capoeira fighter, Christie was just a blast to watch move around the screen, since more often than not I'd get my butt whupped doing any practical combat.  With Christie, what looked like an attempt to retreat would quickly turn into her sweeping her leg around to kick someone in the neck one minute, and the next she's pushing herself off the ground with her hands to slam into an opponent who thought they were about to grab her.

And if someone who looked like that had graced a video game box cover back when I was younger, I might've sold a kidney to own that thing.

2.  Hana and Rain from Fear Effect 2

Okay, I have to be honest for a moment here.  I owned this game series.  Heck, I still own this game series.  Fear Effect was, I thought, a great game with sharp action and a really engaging storyline, and I was excited to play the sequel which had better graphics, an equally interesting storyline, and tighter game controls.

It didn't hurt that this was the kind of thinking going in to the advertising (this one didn't make the cut, but similar ones did):

For the record, there are thirteen different endings to the game.

Now, Hana almost made it onto my list of "intelligent, complex characters" and if I had done a top 20, she'd be there.  She's smart, capable, and in control most of the time, though she does sometimes have to save her partner (in every sense of the word) Rain from danger often.  

And for some reason, the danger Rain was in was frequently phallic in nature.

Maybe Hana will make it into my next "top eleven well done female characters."

There's also one rather unforgettable scene where the two need to sneak an elevator up to an upper floor of a building, so they sneak into the elevator, start to get intimate, then Hana throws Rain's dress over the security camera so nobody can see them get their guns ready.

But based solely on the reputation the game had, I'm pretty sure any teenage boy would've been eager to get their hands on a copy.

1.  Elexis Sinclair from SiN: Episode One

Geez, I know, I know, I keep bringing this game up!  But it's really a fun game, and while it did have one of the most well developed (character-wise) females I've seen in video games, it also has one of the most developed (the other way) women I've ever seen in video games (barring Ivy mentioned before whose figure is downright impossible).

I mean, here's her general appearance in the game:

Here's how she appears to you during the game as you suffer from visions and hallucinations:

Here's professional fetish model Bianca Beauchamp modeling the character as part of the promotion of the game.  The company hired a woman paid to dress in latex for erotic pictures for horny men to advertise their game.

 C'mon, can you really blame them?

I've been pretty firm on the fact that I'm different from I was back when hormones controlled everything, but I first played this game in 2008, and it punched right through every bit of logic I had and grabbed hold of that primitive, teenage part of my brain and refused to let go.

So that's my top eleven of the most blatantly sexual eye candy teenage me could (so far) hope to appreciate from video games I've actually played.  There are much, much more sexualized characters in games (especially in a world where there's actual adult porn video games) but I haven't really ever felt the need to seek any of those out because, really, there just seems to be something wrong about doing computer or video game controls for virtual sex.  Besides, it's 2013, if you really want exploited female figures, that's why they invented the Internet!

Yeah, my next post really needs to be something classier to make up for this.  Maybe we'll look at a nice romantic comedy series or something.

Oh yeah, almost forgot.  Women I know, I'm really, really sorry.  I promise, some day I'll post the Top Eleven Beefcake or something, but I'll probably need a guest list-maker to help me out.