Review: "Street Fighter's Ridiculous New Breasts Are A Glitch, Capcom Says" by Patricia Hernandez, Kotaku

Original article can be found here on Kotaku.

I knew for my first post I would cover an article on Kotaku. So the real question became, which one should I cover?

Hernandez opens her article:

If you’ve seen recent Street Fighter V footage from E3 you’ve probably noticed something a little different about Chun Li. People are remarking that because Chun Li’s breasts act as if they were made out of jello, Street Fighter has gone “full Dead or Alive” in the upcoming sequel.

 She's talking about this (go to the 2m54s mark):



If you noticed, their breasts move a little bit when you select them on the character screen. It only happens on the right side character, so Capcom confirmed it's a bug.

Hernandez continues:

And there you have it. Chun Li’s breasts are not getting a gravitational pull makeover. If nothing else, this is a good reminder that the games shown off during E3 are not always finished, and unfinished builds sometimes have issues that won’t be present in the final game.

"And there you have it."

Here's my issue: the article itself is written fairly objectively, so kudos to Hernandez for that. However, the comment on the front page shows what this article really is. It's clearly a shot fired across Capcom's bow. It's trying to threaten them with further articles decrying "sexism" and "misogyny" for having boobs that move in a fighting game. No, I'm not reading that into the article. The article was advertised on the front page with the title and then "Thank goodness" underneath. They are lecturing developers who put that physics in that it's gross and they won't let them do it.

There was no reason to add that little comment, Kotaku.

Other sources, like Niche Gamer, celebrated the move. They wanted SFV to have DOA physics. Unfortunately, the current climate in gaming won't allow anything to appear like you're objectifying imaginary women.

This whole thing stinks to high heaven of social issues superseding gaming in a gaming publication. Kotaku should be talking about the bug as is, without shoving their opinion about breast physics into it.

This was a simple story: "Hey, the breast physics in the demo were messing up. They won't really bounce around like that in the final version." So why the need to make it some contrived statement? A minor issue, but overall indicative of a problem plaguing the industry right now.