#Though being honest MegaTen has problems well beyond shitty art for a couple games

[mustekalan]

To add on to this in some extra detail: I am an allosexual adult who is attracted to women. I understand horny character designs. I can like and appreciate horny character design. Kaine from NieR, 2B from Automata, Tifa from Final Fantasy VII (don't you dare pretend she's not sexy on purpose), these are characters who look the way they do because someone on the team thought it'd be hot, and honestly, hell yeah dude. I'm down for it. But something about a lot of Suzuhito Yasuda's art that feels... gross. If I had to specify what I meant, I think his anatomy, his faces, and the fact that the majority of the female characters I've seen of his are super sexualized... idk it skeeves me out really bad. On top of all this, female protagonist, in every costume where she's wearing a skirt, has a fucking vacuum pussy so that you can see the outline of her crotch at all times. Classy, BamCo.

On top of this whenever my eyes aren't glazed over and I actually bother to pay attention to the dialogue, it's... well it's bad usually but then again that's more a result of the game being written by someone who doesn't know what young people or the internet are like, which I suppose isn't so bad on its own, but I've noticed a quirk with some of the female characters where it kinda seems like their entire personality can be summed up as bitchy or annoying in some way, while a man around them is framed sympathetically, almost as if the game is like "bitches, am I right?". This isn't super common but it happened enough in the very early game that I was like "was this game made by incels?". It's super offputting, dude. I feel like I'm crazy because I'm like the only person to mention this shit, at least from what I could find online. I think the only criticism I've ever really seen is that the game is super grindy, which, yeah, it is, but nothing about the awful writing and the unbearable character design. It has me super worried about whatever the next Digimon Story game is gonna be like, if that ever comes out.

I guess it doesn't help that I'm playing this stupid game coming off of Final Fantasy XVI, which is a fucking masterclass in writing and character design. Games like FF16 though just kind of make me think about what video games can be, how they can touch on heavy themes in a sensitive and mature way with characters that feel like fleshed out human beings we can understand. And it just kinda stings to go from the height of storytelling in the medium to something so clumsy. And I know FF16 is definitively for adults and Cyber Sleuth is for teenagers, but... Well, Cyber Sleuth is for teenagers. It's a drop in the bucket but I'd genuinely be concerned about what kinds of attitudes about women teenage boys could pick up from the game and games like it, games that are similarly clumsy and fall short in similar ways

I really wish I liked Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth more. I think I just kinda hate the way it's written, and like half the character designs, but the idea of the plot is really cool and also I genuinely like the actual gameplay. I'm looking forward to whatever that next Digimon Story game is gonna be, hopefully they hire a different artist because I just hate looking at Yasuda's art