The ‘Stellar Blade’ controversy, explained

Triple-A games have had it rough these past couple of years — while we’ve had plenty of great titles, there have been just as many disasters.Take the Suicide Squad game, for example. But fans are looking forward to the upcoming Stellar Blade, even if it is proving to be pretty controversial.

The Playstation 5 exclusive is scheduled for release on April 26th, and it comes from South Korean game developer SHIFT UP; it will be the studio’s first Triple-A title. It’s a third person action adventure with a focus on combat and attack patterns. Honestly, it all sounds pretty good so far, so what is the problem?

Why Stellar Blade is controversial

People first started voicing their concerns with the game a few weeks ago when the developers released a gameplay overview. According to Den of Geek, a few of the viewers had evidently become “infatuated”with the game’s protagonist. This isn’t really a surprise considering the player character, known as Eve, has a very sexualized design; you could even say her design is a little too sexualized.

Now, overly sexualized female characters aren’t really anything new to gaming, but the industry as a whole has been moving away from the trope. In fact, in recent years there has been more heavy criticism directed towards “western” developers for doing the opposite, and de-sexualizing female characters. People have complained about the inclusion of female characters that don’t conform to a stereotypical attractive woman that some players have in their head; the controversy involving the consulting studio Sweet Baby Inc is a recent example.

Stellar Blade hearkens back to the old days of gaming for many, and while that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, you have to admit, the design choices and the skimpy outfits are kind of ridiculous. While speaking with Gamesradar, Stellar Blade’s lead developer claims that the studio gave “special attention” to the characters behind because “that’s what [players] see most of.” The comment comes across a bit iffy, to put it lightly. Then you have to take into account past titles from the studio, games like Nikke: Goddess of Victory, a game notorious for its sexualized anime characters, and you start to notice a pattern.

The whole controversy simply boils down to SHIFT UP using a sexualized female protagonist to drum up hype. But in reality, the controversy has evolved beyond Stellar Blade now, with comparisons being made between the female bodies it portrays, vs in the likes of The Last of Us Part II, in order to point out that Eve is being used as a weapon to tear down games with more realistic female representation. So we have to ask, is this game really the problem? Or has it just brought underlying sexism within certain gaming communities to the surface?