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.

I saw Star Wars: The Last Jedi recently, some months after everyone else. I don't have any massive investment in Star Wars, so I wasn't particularly expecting it to catch my attention.

I hadn't realised it had a Sense8 plot! Combined with one of my favourite things in fiction: two people, at odds, forced to interact and therefore beginning to understand each other. OH NO.

The film really needed to give that subplot more space to breathe, more interaction for them to warm up to each other slowly. Which is what fanfiction is for, of course. But I don't know the Star Wars universe well! And I don't think I'd be able to write either Rey or Kylo Ren! So I can't write fanfiction expanding on their remote, reluctant interactions! How dare you do this to me, Star Wars?


There's a bit in NieR: Automata where you're adjusting the game settings, and 9S mentions that the process is being recorded for posterity. I thought it was just a line of worldbuilding dialogue, but he's not kidding; you end up watching the recording later on! A weird, cool insight into the mind of my past self. I could see that, after changing the voice volume, I paused for a moment before choosing 'there's something calming about your voice, 9S' over the standard 'yes, I can hear you.' I could see that I dropped the music volume a couple of notches and then turned it back up, but I don't know why; maybe I was trying to see whether 9S would react to it?

I'm amused by the tales online of people who wandered off to make a sandwich during the original scene and were then stuck watching the recording for ages.

NieR: Automata is still a very strange, unsettling game. But it's got a lot of cute detail. And a lot of strange features. You can get a game-over from the menu screen.

I get a lot of misdirected e-mail intended for other people with my name. My new favourite instance: a few days ago, someone accidentally sent me what looks like their design for a porn website logo. They did not, alas, respond to my 'whoops, I think you have the wrong person' e-mail.


I just remembered that Sam Winchester canonically slept with his actor's wife. That is canonically a thing that happened in Supernatural.

Other canonical events in Supernatural that sound completely made up:

- A man slow dances with an alien.
- The Winchesters investigate reports of a yeti and instead discover an enormous, living teddy bear.
- One of the protagonists is trapped inside an advertisement for herpes medication.
- Someone writes incestuous slashfic about the protagonists onscreen.
- An angel rewrites history so the Titanic never sank, because he really, really hates the film.
- The Winchesters attend a Supernatural convention.
- The show introduces a character who represents the show's creator, and a character who represents the show's fandom, and then pairs them up.

Anyway, here is the trailer for the upcoming Scooby-Doo crossover episode.


I have started playing NieR: Automata! Interesting game. Very weird. Switches wildly between 3D and 2D, and between RPG, action, platforming and bullet hell. Lots of interesting mechanics and charming attention to detail; lots of odd fetishistic stuff. You have the option to explode at any point. It won't actually kill you, but it will put you in critical health and burn off your clothes.

I was thinking 'hmm, which Linkin Park lyric should I use for the title of this entry?' and then remembered this line from 'Forgotten', which is weirdly perfect for a post-apocalyptic game with a blindfolded protagonist.

Something it's worth being aware of, if you're planning to play this yourself: there are no save points until you're past the first area, which takes maybe an hour and includes multiple bosses. Don't start the game unless you have an hour to spare (I wish I'd known this before my first attempt!), and it might be worth starting it on Easy, to reduce the chances that you'll get killed and have to do the entire opening again.

You can change difficulty at any point without penalty, which is nice. I switched from Easy to Normal after reaching the first save point, and then I switched back to Easy because I was just so bad at the shooty spaceship sequences. Easy it is!

Important question: why can't I stroke the moose? I bought an item that would keep moose from running away from me, but I still can't stroke them. How is this acceptable?