T w e n t y S i d e d

So among the male characters who get voicing and screentime we have…

1. Blake Dexter, the fat gross (in mannerisms) Texan.
2. Benjamin Travis, the fat brutishAnd completely wrong personality for his job. leader in the the agency.
3. “Limp Dick” Lenny, who has a bunch of stuff wrong with him.
4. Birdie, who is always covered is bird shit.
5. Sanchez, who clearly has some kind of glandular problem.
6. I guess the sheriff (Clive Skurky) is basically a normal looking guy? I don’t remember him having anything wrong with him, anyway.
7. The aging gun store owner, who evidently had throat cancer or something, and now has to speak through the microphone.

Basically the only whole, able-bodied, healthy, normal-looking guy in the whole game is 47 himself. In contrast, among the female characters we have…

1. Diana, a long-standing character in the series. Here we meet her in person for the first time. While she’s nakedNote that the main menu runs her introduction on a loop, with the camera giving salacious angles. in the shower.
2. “The Girl” (Victoria) who is in a schoolgirl outfit for no reason.
3. Layla Stockton, the personal assistant of Blake. Who is a sexy lady.
4. Jade Nguyen, the personal assistant of Benjamin Travis. Also a sexy lady.
5. Mrs. Cooper, the sheriff’s dominatrix. She’s usually strutting around in revealing bondage gear.
6. The “hot” (young and revealingly dressed) daughter of the gun store owner.
7. You might rush to point out that the game has a non-sexy nun. Fair enough. But I’ll counter with the SEVEN sexy assassin ladies who dress in nun-themed latex.

I don’t have anything against fanservice. I don’t even condemn fanservice for its own sake. Lowbrow entertainment has a right to exist, after all. But in this game it’s so clumsy, obvious, lazy, and heavy-handed. They mix fanservice with brutal, bloody murder over and over again. The dominatrix theme gets repeated again and again. The “ladies are sexy and men are gross” approach to character design isn’t just used to set up contrast between a couple of characters, it’s used everywhere.

In a smarter story, we might give the writers some credit and assume they’re trying to say something with all of this. But this story is so aggressively stupid that I can’t imagine the writers are clever enough to integrate themes into their character designs. This is shallow and stupid and the fanservice is embarrassingly forced. The character designs come off like someone with some oddly specific (and possibly disturbing) tastes just wanted to make something for their own gratification, and they didn’t care if it was appropriate for the genre or the franchise.

Like Rutskarn said, there’s a difference between having 47 stumble over dirty secrets in the hidden parts of a level, and just randomly sprinkling titillating subject matter all over the place.

Also, I’d really love if the folks who argue about gender politics could just take a deep breath and maybe not do that. I don’t care what side you’re on. We’re talking about the stupid framing in this videogame, and I am not opening the floodgates for everyone to air their political grievances wrt:gender at this time. Be cool. This game has enough things to be outraged about. Let’s not go looking for more. I will be moderating the comments with an eye towards preventing flame wars.

Next week we will show what I mean when I say the story is “aggressively stupid”. The next cutscene in the game is a spectacular example of what happens when videogame developers try to make movies and mistakenly assume that making a movie isn’t any more difficult than watching one.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

It’s time to play the new Hitman game. Does it hold up to the legacy of the series? Or is it a dumb, shallow, tedious, gross, thematically confused, mechanically shallow, poorly written, hopelessly contrived, overly linear and occasionally ridiculous farce? If you’ve watched more than 10 minutes of our show, you already know the answer. But you’ll probably watch it anyway.

Also, it wasn’t until today that I realized that HK-47 was a reference to Agent 47. Because I’m apparently bad at pattern recognition.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.