Written by: Rik
Date posted: September 9, 2012
Two women feature prominently in Dark Messiah: Xana, your spirit guide who happens to have a ‘sexy’ female form, and Leanna, nubile apprentice wizard and wearer of impractical clothing.
As I mentioned in the main review, I wasn’t paying an awful lot of attention to plot specifics (if indeed there are any) and most of the dialogue passed me by. But you can’t help but notice two things:
a) Xana is constantly in your ear asking/telling you to do stuff. She keeps calling you ‘darling’, and her dialogue is delivered with bothersome suggestiveness. Oh, if only you’d do exactly as she’d say, then maybe you could do sexy things together, all night long.
b) Leanna is hardly a passive female character; she fights alongside you and generally has a role to play beyond ‘generic female companion’. But she praises you breathlessly for being heroic every five minutes or so, and also seems to be wearing a very short skirt, for no apparent reason.
Another one to file under “unnecessarily embarrassing portrayal of women in games”, then.
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