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 can't entirely believe it's Christmas Eve already, but I've done the traditional annual bad Christmas manip, so I suppose it must be!




It's the Diaz brothers, from Life Is Strange 2, which I finished three weeks ago and haven't stopped thinking about since. All they want for Christmas is a safe place to sleep. Someone please help these boys.

Incredible detail in the last episode of Life Is Strange 2: there's a point where you're trying to tune a radio, and if you linger on a particular frequency you can hear Ren of Oxenfree trying to make contact with Alex and Jonas after they're split up. I've mentioned before that Oxenfree reminded me a bit of Life Is Strange, and now it turns out that they take place in the same universe, despite being by entirely different developers!

Am I morally obliged to write fanfiction? I think I might be.

Have a great Christmas, if you're celebrating! ♥

I've started playing Night in the Woods! It strikes me as ideal for a Higurashi AU: small towns, dark secrets, the 'outsider' (although Mae is technically returning to Possum Springs) and the group of friends who already belong to the town. Perhaps fortunately, my ability to write this is limited by the fact that I haven't yet experienced the last few Higurashi instalments. (Come on, official translators!)

I probably won't write Night in the Woods fanfiction, to be honest. I really struggle with writing characters if I don't know what their voices sound like, so I rarely write for unvoiced canons.

Choosing which characters to spend time with is pretty stressful. Here's the problem: videogame logic dictates that you should choose the character you want to focus on and just spend time with them at every opportunity. Games are often set up to give you the most satisfying payoff if you pick a goal and stick to it, because then the game will recognise, 'Oh, this player wants a better relationship with Bea; let's channel them into the "bonding with Bea" plotline.' Real-world friendship logic, meanwhile, dictates that you should divide your time between your friends, rather than focusing on one to the exclusion of the others; in real life, if you spend all your time with Bea, Gregg is going to start feeling abandoned. I don't know which sort of logic this game is operating on!

(To be honest, this was an issue that barely crossed my mind in Oxenfree, because I was so invested in Alex and Jonas's stepsibling relationship. Screw everyone else; I was absolutely going to spend all my time with Jonas. And Ren did end up feeling a bit abandoned, but, hey, I had a great relationship with my stepbrother, so I didn't care! Sorry, Ren.)

I'm trying to go with what feels right without worrying about it too much. Bea and I had a horrible conversation yesterday; I suppose today I should spend time with her and try to make amends. Gregg's lonely because his boyfriend's out of town; I'll visit him today.

But everything we end up doing is so antisocial! I don't want to beat up a car with a baseball bat! I DON'T WANT TO SHOPLIFT OR TALK BEA INTO SHOPLIFTING, GAME, DON'T MAKE ME DO THIS. But no; apparently I cannot prevent Mae from being a bad influence. I do like characters who make relentlessly terrible decisions, but I become distressed when I'm playing a game that makes me carry out their terrible decisions!

(I did enjoy the 'spraying passers-by with the fish fountain bit'. That was another bit that made me go 'NO, MAE, THIS IS A BAD IDEA' at first, but seeing Bea's progression from 'oh, my God, what are you doing?????' to uncontrollable laughter made me smile.)

There was one point where I got stuck and had to look up how to progress online, because the solution was so clearly a bad idea that it would never have occurred to me to try it. JUST JAM YOUR PAW INTO THE ELECTRICITY, IT'LL BE FINE.

So far the game feels a little slow - nothing's really happened in terms of plot - but I suppose that makes sense; you're playing a drifting, directionless young adult in a dying town, and playing through day after day of nothing in particular happening helps to convey that sense of drifting. The dialogue is fun enough to keep it interesting. I really like all of Mae's silly doodles in her notebook, and the playful undertone of her relationship with her parents.

My favourite part so far is when you discover that Selmers is a poet:

My heart is
A dankness
But when I see you
I feel a thankness.

When I feel
A blueness
All I need
Is a youness.

'That's very romantic.'
'It's about my horse.'
'Oh.'
'We're just friends.'

I hope you like it when I talk at excessive length about videogames, because it's that time again. Ginger, old friend and new housemate, is replaying Life Is Strange, and it's got me thinking about narrative choices.

In the last year, I've experienced three games - Life Is Strange, Until Dawn, Oxenfree - in which the gameplay consists almost solely of making choices. There's the occasional puzzle in Life Is Strange, there are QTEs in Until Dawn, but fundamentally these games are about the player making choices to shape the story.

In theory.

In practice, these games have a linear story to tell. You can't drag the game down wholly different paths, in the way a Choose Your Own Adventure novel might offer. There are a handful of variables, but every playthrough will hit more or less the same story points and end in more or less the same way. Even in Until Dawn, where the way you play determines who lives and who dies, it's not possible to kill everyone off in the first few hours and make the game go '???? roll credits, I guess?' - certain characters are guaranteed to survive long enough to steer you to a predetermined endpoint. Ginger is currently doing an arsehole run of Life Is Strange, making all the horrible decisions they avoided on previous playthroughs, and at moments it's painful to watch, but it's still much the same story I experienced on my own run.

I mentioned this to Ginger, and their response was something I wasn't expecting: they put forward a case for games like this following roughly the same path and ending in roughly the same way, regardless of player choice. I'd always just assumed that 'your choices have as much impact as possible on the narrative' was the ideal point for these games to reach, and the current 'your choices can change small aspects of the story without actually changing the story's direction' situation was a result of budgetary and time constraints. But Ginger pointed out the social aspect to playing games like this: when you've finished a chapter or a game, you'll want to discuss it and theorise with other people playing the same game. If your choices could make Life Is Strange branch off onto one of ten different paths, that wouldn't be possible; you'd go, 'Hey, wasn't it strange when Max drank from the magical fountain and became a unicorn?' and nobody else would be able to discuss it with you, because only 10% of players even come across the magical fountain.

Thinking about it, this applies to fanfiction as well. In total, I've written ten works of fanfiction for these three narrative choice games, most of them set post-ending. If I hadn't been able to go 'yes, I know that the reader's playthrough will have ended in roughly the same way as mine and therefore they'll be able to tell what's going on here,' I'd never have been able to write them. I feel 'we'd better make things easier for the fanfic writers' is possibly not that high on the list of game developers' priorities, but I'm still glad that I was able to create things inspired by these games.

Life Is Strange also has strong themes of memory and nostalgia, of beautiful fleeting moments, of returning to where you came from and realising you're no longer the person you used to be. Would it be possible to write a game with twenty different endings and make its themes feel coherent?

You could argue that a game shouldn't try to be a film, and, while the developers going 'we know the story we're telling here; you can nudge the tiller occasionally, but we're the ones steering' makes for a better narrative, 'the reins are entirely in your hands! go wild!' would make for a better game. But I think I've been persuaded that greater freedom of choice shouldn't necessarily be the goal of all choice-based narrative games. Maybe Life Is Strange isn't an example of a genre that needs to develop; maybe it's a genre that's exactly where it needs to be.

It could still be fun to have the occasional cinematic game where your choices really do shape the narrative. But, for the moment, with all the budgetary issues involved, that might have to remain the domain of visual novels.

I do think choice-based games could do with fewer endings that explicitly undo the effects of all your choices, though. If the entire game consisted of the player making decisions, don't render those decisions meaningless!

Someone commented on my horrible Oxenfree fic to say I'd made them 'ship Alex/Jonas, and I felt a bit weird about it. I don't think there's anything wrong with 'shipping it, but it seemed strange that I'd caused this, given that I don't 'ship it myself. How had I converted someone else to seeing a stepsibling relationship - a stepsibling relationship I enjoy a lot! - as romantic?

In retrospect, my first mistake was writing about said stepsiblings making out.


I received World of Final Fantasy for Christmas! I am pleased to report that, although it is very different from Final Fantasy XV in most respects, they share a penchant for terrible puns. When you activate a switch to progress in an early dungeon:

'A new path! Check out that switchcraft!'
'Now we know switch way to go!'
'Switchever one of you thinks you're being clever is about to get a knuckle sandswitch.'

I finished the game a week or so ago. It was cute, but I had little real emotional investment in it, sadly. I did very much enjoy having an adorable baby Behemoth on my head, though. Plus there's an absolutely incredible Final Fantasy X reference at one point.

Bizarre omissions from World of Final Fantasy: Bartz, Terra, Cloud, Squall, Tidus and Lightning are present, but no Zidane. There are no characters whatsoever from Final Fantasy XII. Aerith isn't there! For some reason, this is the one that really shocked me. I encountered Tifa and went 'well, obviously we'll be meeting Aerith at some point.' Nope!

Faris and Quistis have really poorly suited voices. This is particularly frustrating because Faris's voice would have worked perfectly well for Quistis; it's just not a voice for slinging pirate slang around in. I'm delighted that Faris is in the game, though!

I've started to come around to Doug Erholtz's voice for Squall at last, having disliked it in Kingdom Hearts II. This means that, for the first time, I've started to think seriously about the possibility of a Final Fantasy VIII remake. If the VII remake does well, is there a chance they'd do VIII as well? There's a part of me that really wants to see that, and there's a part that doesn't know whether my heart would be able to take it. This game means a lot to me.

If nothing else, I suppose it'd provide an excuse to replay it. I've played the original so many times I really can't justify doing it again. (I had to buy a replacement copy of Final Fantasy VIII a few years ago, having played my first copy until the discs just gave up and stopped working. The game lost the ability to tell when a battle had ended, so my party would defeat the enemies and then just... stand there, looking confused, waiting for orders to fight something that wasn't there.)

I've hugely enjoyed the last couple of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend episodes ('Will Scarsdale Like Josh's Shayna Punim?' and 'Josh Is the Man of My Dreams, Right?'). In particular, I'm loving the Nathaniel storyline. He could be Jeff Winger's evil (well, more evil) brother; there's a definite physical resemblance, and half his lines sound like they could easily be coming out of Jeff's mouth. They're also both lawyers with father issues, come to think of it. (Plus, hey, Jeff canonically has an evil double.)

I don't love Nathaniel half as much as I love Jeff Winger, but he's fun. He also had a pretty incredible song in 'Josh Is the Man of My Dreams, Right?' (warning for weight-shaming, because Nathaniel is the worst).

I'm horrendously predictable when it comes to this character type.

Fiction: Hey, this guy's an arsehole!
Riona: Wow, what an arsehole!
Fiction: He occasionally shows glimpses of having feelings, though.
Riona: Uh-oh.
Fiction: What's this? Is he attracted to a young woman who he thinks of as off-limits?
Riona: Don't do this to me.
Fiction: He tries to resist! But he can't stop glancing over at her!
Riona: GOD, FINE.

I wouldn't say I 'ship him with Rebecca, exactly. I definitely don't want them to be together. (I don't really want Rebecca to be in a romantic relationship with anyone; romantic relationships aren't good for her.) But I do want them to have lots of uncomfortable sexual tension and possibly make out sometimes.


Given Life Is Strange, Until Dawn and now Oxenfree, I seem to have fallen heavily into the Bad Teen Decisions Simulator genre of videogame. (Come to think of it, Dangan Ronpa is also a series of games about bad teen decisions, although it doesn't let you make those bad decisions yourself.)

This is a great genre because it lends itself so well to one of my favourite fanfiction themes: characters undergo traumatic experiences, and then the story focuses on them talking about them, or refusing to talk about them, or not having anyone to talk about them with. The entire concept of these games is 'a handful of people go through horrendous experiences that nobody else will ever understand or believe'. They're perfect.

I didn't actually realise I had such a fondness for this until I looked back at all the one-shots I posted in 2016. There are fifteen, and this theme crops up in no fewer than seven of them. Whoops.

At one point in Oxenfree, I accidentally chose a dialogue option that made Alex say she exercised a lot every morning. I was very annoyed with myself. No, I've made it canon that she's disciplined and she exercises and now I can't relate to her any more! (Alex is still great.)


I've suddenly remembered one of my all-time favourite YouTube videos, and I thought I'd link to it in case anyone hasn't seen it yet. It's two men dancing to Moulin Rouge's 'El Tango de Roxanne' in the street. The video itself is low-quality, sadly, but the intensity of the dance comes through so clearly that it barely matters (and the intensity of the song doesn't hurt). You can watch it over here!

Played another hour or two of Oxenfree! I've just opened the gate to Adler's house.

I keep thinking about the dialogue choices in this game. When I play, Alex is a peacemaker. She worries about people and tries to see things from their point of view, even if she doesn't necessarily like them. She tries to get along with everyone, although she doesn't always succeed. She's inquisitive; she's interested in history; she can get excited about little things. She makes jokes to deflect serious conversations. She avoids talking about Michael if she can. She feels like such a complete, established character to me, and it's strange to think back on dialogue choices I turned down and realise I could have been playing her as apathetic and hostile the entire time.

The game's excellent voice acting helps. Whatever responses I choose for her seem to flow so naturally that it's hard to imagine she could have said anything else.

I'm also interested in 'Scrödinger's backstory' moments. Several hours into the game, Jonas asked whether I was religious. I said no. Up until that point, Alex's beliefs could have been anything, but the moment I picked 'no' she'd been an atheist all along. My Alex is a non-smoker because of a bad experience the last time she tried smoking. That's something that happened in the past, but it didn't become true until I declined Jonas's offer of a light. My decision in the present altered Alex's past.

Videogames are weird.

Another aspect of Oxenfree that's been playing on my mind is the moment where your reflection gives you advice for a later point in the game. Because it's not just the game giving you advice; it's an actual person. A PSN username shows up alongside your reflection. You see the dialogue options - 'do A', 'do B' - that the reflection is choosing from. The game makes it as clear as possible that the person giving you advice is a real person who's also playing this game, and that they're choosing to say what they do.

It's such an effective way of inducing paranoia. If my reflection had just given me advice, without the indication that there's a real person behind it, I'd have gone 'well, I suppose I'll take its advice!' But introducing a real person changes things. I don't know this person! Can I trust this person? Is this a helpful person trying to give me good advice, or is it a troll trying to lead me into disaster for their own amusement?

The possibilities I can think of:

- The other player knows that A is the right thing to do, and in saying 'do A' they're trying to help me. I should do A!
- The other player knows that A is a bad idea, and in saying 'do A' they're trying to screw up my playthrough. I shouldn't do A.
- The other player did B on their own playthrough, and something bad happened. They don't know whether A is good or bad, but they know that B is bad, so they're trying to give the best advice they can with limited knowledge. I should probably do A.
- The important question isn't whether I do A or B; it's whether I take the reflection's advice. The moment the reflection said 'do A', A became either the right or the wrong decision. The other player could be trying to give me good advice, but giving good advice isn't necessarily possible. I... either should or shouldn't do A, but I suspect I probably shouldn't.

I'm so fascinated by this game!