Trabia Garden

A couple of people responded to my question about male love interests in videogames by saying they were having trouble thinking of games they'd played with female protagonists. So, in case anyone's interested, here's the list of games I've played in which the main playable character is female!

In cases where control is split between two or more characters, I've taken who's presented as the protagonist into account. Final Fantasy XIII, for example, has you controlling different characters at different times, but the protagonist is definitely Lightning, whereas, although you could argue that Sam is the main playable character of Until Dawn or that Mizuki is the main playable character of AI: The Somnium Files: nirvanA Initiative, those cases aren't clear-cut enough to be listed here. I haven't counted games in which you can choose the protagonist's gender; these are games that were specifically designed around a female main character.

I've listed these games in alphabetical order and included some brief notes about each one, in case anyone's wondering whether to pick any of these games up. I've put asterisks next to games I particularly enjoyed. (Which isn't to say I didn't enjoy the others; there's only one game on this list I'd actively advise against playing (spoiler: it's Beyond: Two Souls).)

I've also only included games I've played myself, not games I've experienced through Let's Plays or watching friends play them, which is why I've omitted Assassin's Creed: Liberation, Danganronpa Another Episode, Life Is Strange: Before the Storm, We Know the Devil and The Zodiac Trial. But then I changed my mind and included We Know the Devil anyway. You can't tell me what to do.


( Videogames I've played with female protagonists. )


I noticed while writing this how often I used the phrase 'young woman' in the game descriptions, so I took a moment to work out who the oldest protagonist in this list actually was. The results were slightly discouraging. By a long way, the oldest of these female protagonists is Chloe of Uncharted: Lost Legacy; I'm having trouble establishing her exact age, but I think she's around forty when the game takes place. I think second place goes to Red of Transistor, at the grand old age of twenty-seven.

Beyond: Two Souls: You and your partner have been captured on a mission for the CIA! Now the captors are threatening your partner with a knife in order to get you to talk! Will you press the 'talk' button to save him from his terrible fate? Will you? Will you???
Riona, not even bothering to touch the controller: oh no, a shirtless man in pain, what will I do

Beyond: Two Souls, or Teen Ghost Misery Simulator, as it's become known in our household, is an extremely bad game and I don't recommend it. It controls frustratingly and is relentlessly miserable in a way that just isn't fun, and the non-chronological timeline means that you get all the problems of David Cage's writing without the one thing David Cage is actually good at, i.e. ambitious branching storytelling. At one point I walked into a run-down bar, went 'there's no way Cage hasn't written an attempted sexual assault scene here,' left the bar immediately and checked online to find I was absolutely right.

(I feel a certain unwanted kinship with Cage because I too am incapable of keeping my id out of the things I write, although I hope I'm at least slightly better at giving the impression that I have at some point met and interacted with an actual human being.)

The 'you're a girl tethered to a ghost' concept is vaguely interesting, but YOU CAN'T SMOOCH THE GHOST, WHAT'S THE POINT.

Although at one point a guy was making out with the protagonist on the bed and I could swoop in as the ghost to bop the guy's foot, as a way of saying 'hey, I'm here too, just hanging out and watching,' which was pretty good.


WHILE I'M COMPLAINING ABOUT DAVID CAGE, under the cut are a few gripes about Detroit: Become Human. (Plot gripes, specifically, although those certainly aren't the game's only faults. Both Detroit: Become Human and Beyond: Two Souls have some really glaring instances of going 'I'M TOTALLY CAPABLE OF HANDLING THIS HEAVY TOPIC' and fumbling it hideously. In the case of Beyond: Two Souls specifically, there was some shocking mishandling of a topic I have very strong personal feelings about.)

( Spoilers for Detroit: Become Human. )

Although it's frustrating in many respects, I could actually pick out a fair bit to like in Detroit: Become Human. It had interesting ideas, and by a long way it's the most ambitious branching narrative I've ever seen in a videogame. It also had characters I actually liked! This genuinely shocked me; I didn't like a single character in Heavy Rain and had sort of assumed that David Cage couldn't make characters I cared about. But I like Hank Anderson enormously, and I like all the three playable characters a reasonable amount. Also, Sumo is a very good dog.

I can say exactly one thing for Beyond: Two Souls, and that's that it's good to play with a friend watching so you can laugh at it together. (That's actually a quality Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls and Detroit: Become Human all share, so there's definitely a place for Quantic Dream games.)

Oh, all right, and I was happy with the ending I got, where Jodie returned to her friends from when she was homeless and they all lived together and there was lots of hugging. That was cute. I'm glad (and surprised) that it was possible to get an ending that wasn't entirely miserable.


A couple of days ago, a videogame journalist put out the call 'Are you in Detroit: Become Human fandom? Wanna talk to me for an article about what attracted you to the game?' My friends tried to get me to participate, but what on Earth would I say in response to 'what attracted you to the game?'

'Android limbs are so intriguingly detachable.'

'I'm prepared to overlook how horrendously this game misuses civil rights imagery because it gives me a great opportunity to write self-indulgent fanfiction about the horrible consent issues inherent in android programming.'

'I don't have many fandoms where I can plausibly write about one character repeatedly murdering another until the murdered character starts to get turned on by it.'

Maybe not.

Basically, what attracts me to Detroit: Become Human is that it has interesting characters and concepts trapped in a bad story and I want to rescue them by putting them in a worse one.