Now, the world is locked in perpetual disagreement; a black mist obscures blue skies because people just can’t figure out if the female protagonists in their favorite video games are sexy or not. That’s why we must turn our heads to the past, where Silent Hill 2 developers protect the key to our salvation.
In a behind-the-scenes video included with the 2001 game’s European Special Two-Disc Edition, uploaded to YouTube by streamer Fungo, Team Silent character artist Sato Takayoshi explains that there’s an expensive cost to being too beautiful: “Maria was sexier when we first started out,” the video narrator quotes him saying, “but her plunging neckline gave us too many technical problems.”
Takayoshi says he wanted to make sure Maria – the physical manifestation of protagonist James’ wet daydreams about his murdered wife – seemed “disturbing. And, uh, sometimes looks cute.”
He’s proud of the fact that, unlike the Final Fantasy games he cites, where “the main girl character doesn’t have a wrinkle,” Maria is “more realistic.”
“If you are attracted by some woman,” he says, “she’s not perfect. If you take her pictures… sometimes, her face is” – here, Takayoshi makes a strategically ogre-ific expression – “like that. It’s not perfect. […] You’re in love with her because she’s human.”
I think he’s right. While I’ve always believed that certain games benefit from their characters looking like complete fantasies – Soul Calibur and its surprisingly curvaceous reptile knight, Lizardman, come to mind – others require a soft brush of imperfection to fire up your feelings.
When Maria was at her hottest, the narrator explains that Takayoshi wasn’t “happy with the way the graphics looked.” Eventually, in what the narrator describes as an interest in turning “the head of any red-blooded male player,” Takayoshi decided to model sensual facial expressions for the beautiful ghost Maria on himself, an approachable, flesh-and-blood man.
“I couldn’t trust the face motion capture,” he says. “But if I make [certain faces] in front of the mirror, I can notice it,” the physical subtleties of emotion, like muscle twitching and tightness, “I can capture it.”
You are what you love.
