| axumblade said: It wasn't until I looked at this post that I realized how many great female led games released last year. Hopefully Horizon: FW is good enough to make it a third year in a row for female protagonists on here. |
I have to admit that I'd find it extremely cool intrinsically if there were to be a third consecutive case of this happening, and yes, Horizon Zero Dawn is like either the first or second best-selling video game with a female lead character to date (we need a new sales update to confirm if it's passed the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot's sales yet, but it was close as of the last update we got)...but I would point out that, frankly, that particular game likely benefited from the social context surrounding its release window in early 2017. That was the year when "feminism" was the most-searched term on Webster's Online Dictionary, the year when the original Women's March wound up being the most-attended single-day protest event in American history, and the year the Me Too movement was named Time magazine's Person of the Year. It was, in other words, the peak of the fourth and most recent feminist wave here in the United States, and women-centric media benefited from it across the board. For example, in film, not only did The Shape of Water win Best Picture at the Oscars for the year, but what's more 2017 also emerged as the first year since 1958 that all of the top three highest-grossing box office blockbusters were titles with female lead characters (those being The Last Jedi, the live-action Beauty and the Beast remake, and the Wonder Woman movie). In terms of TV series, similarly, The Handmaid's Tale became both a mass and award-winning phenomenon. Horizon Zero Dawn became one of the two all-time best-selling video games with a female lead character, and also the most award-winning female-led video game in history up to that point in that same cultural-historical context. Probably not a coincidence, especially given the gaming media's contemporaneous framing of it as comparable to the well-known Legend of Zelda games. It just seems to me like that moment has now passed and that, accordingly, the same phenomenon is unlikely to be repeated this year, and what's more even the original wasn't actually 2017's overall GOTY winner either here or in general for that matter.
Also, considering that the Breath of the Wild sequel is (so far) due out this year, somehow I kind of doubt that anything else will be winning the ultimate award on this site for 2022. The next GOTY award is pretty much already in the bag, I think.
