the line separating projecting feminine confidence and trashy fan service with a reason made up post design approval has been crossed a long time ago with this particular design. it's hilarious that just because there is some story attached to it, people will try to make up excuses for what is blatantly fan service. being proud of your femininity and expressing it by wearing underwear to battle? get a grip. obviously this design was made before it was even decided to make her a hermaphrodite. It is fetishized and overworked to the point that it was probably the designers fantasy fetish for a long time before they started working on the game.
Some Nier Gestalt/Automata spoliers
Kaine's design always struck me as "chaotic," not just feminine or sexy. Then again EVERYTHING about the character is chaotic, from how she talks, how she looks, the way she fights, etc,. If this was like xenoblade chronicles 2, where virtually every character was provocative, i'd get some people's points, but she's the only character in both Nier games that dresses like this. Neither Devola, Popola, or 2B have that extreme of a design. The only person remotely close would be A2, but her look is rugged from being a fugitive that was left for dead.
I've heard this argument of "she just looks that way bcuz of fan service," to be valid in cases like MGSV and Xenoblade 2. I don't think that's the best way to approach every feminine design, though. I would even say that approach is somewhat sexist.
Can you explain? I kinda get Ivy's outfit, her being having a dominanting, in incontrol type play style, but what does kaine's outfit symbolise?
Part of the reason why she dresses like that isn't just "to express her femininity." She's a character born from extremes. The people in the town she came from were either cowards or psychopaths. The girl gets assaulted by other children and adults treat her like an outcast, just because she was intersex. The only person that cared about her was her grandmother, but even then she swears like a sailor and roughs her up everyday (this is actually where her personality came from). Then after grandma is crushed to death by a giant monster (something she witnesses btw,) Kaine gets possessed by a male entity that fills her head with killing. With all that in mind, if she wants to identify as a female, after having her gender questioned, it wouldn't be a stretch to think she would come up with the most extreme way possible to express that. I'm not saying it's a good design or that it was needed, but it's VERY plausible, given the character's history. She's also the only character in the Nier series who could pull this look off canonically. If Popola and Devola dressed like that without any context, it'd look fucking weird and, tbh, it doesn't suit 2B at all.
So basically
In terms of SoulCalibur, the closet character I could compare her to wouldn't be Ivy, but Tira. She's another character with both a chaotic/sexual design and background. Project Soul emphasized this by giving her two personalities.
this game already has enough revealing underwear. I wanna make cool looking fighters, not victoria's secret models. worst part about this is that we probably won't be able to put anything on top of this, because it's gonna clip horrendously. and every second match online is gonna wear this, if people are still playing by then, that is...
To be fair, it's a japanese fighting game, you're going to get victoria secret models. People love to bring up Dead or Alive, but even Tekken, Streetfighter, BlazBlue, Guilty Gear, and others have characters with those designs. I would suggest not taking designs from these fighting games so seriously. How the outfit meshes with others, I don't know. I'm willing to take any new CaS parts at this point
That's my 2 cents, now where's the damn dlc Project Soul?
