Fighting Games Friday: Tekken Was So Close with Lidia
Bandai Namco had a simple design idea in mind for Tekken 7’s newest character, Lidia Sobieska: To counter those used for other female characters. She wouldn’t be a female fighting game character if she didn’t have sex appeal, but its subtler in Lidia’s case compared to the overtness from other characters — especially with their alternate custom outfits. Lidia’s default outfits are practical for someone of her stature, a karateka user who’s also, remarkably, the Prime Minister of Poland. Her custom outfits are similarly practical rather than embracing pandering; even her swimsuit is a tight wetsuit. (Tekken, to be fair, is better at this than other fighting games, including this company’s own Soulcalibur.) She even has muscular definition, which the designers forgot with all the other female characters.
Lidia is close being a perfect anthesis to all the other female characters in Tekken 7, and, hell, a stand-out example among female fighting game characters as a whole. There’s one big problem that prevented her design from going all the way: Her age.
When details of the character were first announced, it was clear she had to be among one of the older ladies among the still-playable set in the Tekken series. There’s no way the Prime Minister of an entire country couldn’t be younger than her 30s; even if Tekken has a history of absurd cast members (we’re talking about a franchise with playable bears and a kangaroo here, and they’re not bonus characters), making her too young would push beyond willing suspension of disbelief. Yet, they did. The bio on the official website (helpfully translated for the Tekken series wiki) says she became Prime Minister at 29 years old, younger than any other country leader that exists in the world today. Even in 2021, it remains evident that fighting game designers don’t want to make female characters too old; and here Lidia is still among the older female fighters.
The Tekken series has a history of making eye-rolling excuses to keep female characters young. The best one involves Nina and Anna Williams, the only two female characters who’ve been playable in the franchise since it started. There’s a 20-year time skip between Tekken 2 and Tekken 3, but the team made sure not to age Nina and Anna up by having them put into a cryogenic sleep for precisely that amount of time. The other female characters in the franchise at the time, Michelle Chang and Jun Kazama, were replaced with younger counterparts. This has only affected the female characters, as guys like Paul Phoenix and Heihachi Mishima were allowed to age.
This trope was mind-boggling-but-excusable back in the 90s, when the first three Tekken games released; those were simply the standards at the time. We’re in 2021 now, more than 20 years since that period. Yet, this trope remains, and Lidia isn’t the only example of this introduced in Tekken 7. Take Kunimitsu, the first character to release for the current fourth season pass. Instead of the original returning, who hasn’t made a canonical appearance since Tekken 2, she’s been replaced by her daughter. Time in the series has also barely progressed since Tekken 3, to ensure that no one has aged much in the time since.
Lidia’s character is likely proof that a force existed within the Tekken 7 team that wanted to push this envelope a little further by including an older female fighter. But the market trends perceived by them demanded they stop just short by making her 29. I say “perceived” because they’re underestimating the number of players who want a different kind of fighter in this series and other fighting games. It’s not just me here, is what I’m saying. The dudes who need female characters that pander to otaku sensibilities can be satisfied with other characters, like Lucky Chloe.
It’s remarkably and ridiculously difficult to think of older female fighters in fighting games. The first ones that came to my mind were Mitsuko from Bloody Roar (who, surprise, only appeared in the first game) and Mary Ivonskaya from the Tobal games (a sadly dead franchise). There’s, to a lesser extent, also C. Viper in the Street Fighter series and Vanessa in King of Fighters, both of whom are precisely 30-year-old ladies with children. Don’t think this is just an issue with Japanese games, because I’m struggling to think of exceptions in western titles like the Mortal Kombat series and Killer Instinct. Most female characters in those games have ambiguous ages to avoid dealing with this entirely, if they aren’t dead or immortal.
Topics like this will always lead to a subset of too-online guys (and they’re always male) complaining about how this isn’t that big of a deal or isn’t important, dudes whose tastes are already being more than catered to. Contrary to what they think, this is a good topic to occasionally cover, because there’s nothing wrong with pushing for more diverse casts in terms of multiple ages, genders, and races being accounted for. This is one that apparently won’t change with time, so I fully expect to cover the topic again in the future. Perhaps — perhaps — game developers will be the ones to surprise me, but I doubt it.
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Geoff
News Editor | Geoff is some nerd who writes for a blog and thinks he's knowledgeable. He write a lot about video games, but is capable of writing about other subjects, too. Twitter
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I swear that “woman older than 30” has to be the one of rarest archetypes in fighting games…
Indeed. For a long time, female fighting game characters either stopped aging, vanished outside of non-canonical stuff, or had something else (like Nina and Anna being cryogenically frozen) happen to them before they could hit that age. Hopefully that’s changing now.