I can't speak for the game since I haven't played it, but I can say that the aesthetics are rockin'. And that's coming from someone who usually doesn't like overly stylized stuff.

Damn right. Good job people!

Actually, I'd wonder why a male author felt he couldn't write a halfway decent female character. I've seen so many amazing male characters created by female authors, why not the reverse? Is it really because they "can't"? Or are the actual reasons secretly infinitely more stupid?

I think that 1. Kotaku needs to move away from the rest of Gawker or at least be able to choose which version of Kinja they get to use (I REALLY liked that last one). 2. Even just getting a big red BANNED will make a lot of people think twice even if it's a burner. And as you said satisfying at the very least.

I love the excuse of "not being able to write women", as if these skillful scribes were absolutely aceing it writing men, and didn't want to spoil their faultless records. Learning how to write characters beyond their comfort zones would be a good exercise for them - it might make them better at writing in general.

That would probably work pretty well since even the best mod can have a bad day.

All your numbers are nonsense. All of them. "An extra 10 million to make a female PC" is the biggest crock.

I think, many moons ago, user mods actually existed?

Pretty sure the skirt physics thing is a shot at Nintendo and New Super Mario Bros. Wii. They said Peach wasn't playable because dress physics are hard.

I only signed up here a few months ago but I've been a lurker through 4 design changes now, and think I there are a lot of people here who are responsible enough to make that work.

On the other hand, understanding an 8=foot tall genetically engineered super soldier is easy.

To answer your first question, the gaming industry is male-dominated and a bad working place for female developers.

"300 million to make"

It's deflection.

Obviously we don't want to feed the trolls, but some people (like the one I dealt with earlier today) need to just outright have their commenting privileges revoked.

You don't find it odd that 50% of the population is largely missing from the entire industry, despite the existence of female gamers? Why would that be? Why is it normal or acceptable?

So, I know we can recommend comments, but is there a way to report comments/users? Needed to do it earlier today because of someone, and I'm sure this article will bring in plenty of inappropriate comments (already saw one before posting).

Eh, there's two main paradigms when it comes to the whole JRPG definition, and for the most part the holders of each definition think they're correct while the other half using the term find the other group to be insane. Some think it's an RPG made by a development team in Japan when that's not even really that…

Demon's Souls: When Japanese studios make better western RPGs than the West.

The game looks great and I'm happy that such a major company is publishing something this risky in 2013, but I don't think I'll ever call it a Japanese Role Playing Game... It's an RPG with a turn based combat system, and certainly it takes a lot of inspiration from games that were designed in Japan, but I'm not sure…