Asian media culture is quite different than western culture in this regard. Teenagers having explicit feminine features is quite common in JRPG's, (Dragon Quest, Persona, Legend of Heroes, Atelier the list is basically endless). A lot of times they will be touched as well. Anime and Team Ninja games also feature those. Sometimes it's a bit more innocent and nuanced than other times. For example the removable armor of 2B is not meant for much else than sexualisation and doesn't look much older than Eve/Evie and is also an Android.

The values of countries like Japan/Korea are massively different to modern Western values. In general I don't care too much about it, Persona 5 is the most explicit example imo, which like you said nobody cares about. In the West we go so far that every teen movie with a bit of more explicit Romance has 25 year old actors.

Oh well the West doesn't think much about gun violence and promoting toxic relationships in basically every romantic movie, so each culture has it's own problematic aspects.

From Shift Up:

"I believe there is a limit to progress based on price, whether it's for PCs or consoles," he says. "Therefore, we are prioritizing making the game playable for users with current-generation consoles or current PCs."

CEO Kim says that any advancements in art or design are being made with current system standards in mind, not "on the premise of rising hardware specs."

I love this series, and the Blood Rain new protagonist reveal kind of threw me of guard so I started a petition asking Shift Up to bring Eve back as the protagonist.

My take: Stellar Blade without Eve just isn't Stellar Blade. She's the reason the series blew up, one of the most iconic new heroines in years. A direct sequel should continue her story, not replace her. If any of you feel the same, it's here: [link]. Curious where everyone else lands on it. Not sure if petitions is allowed here, if not I'll remove link right away.

I do hope we still get to play as Eve, maybe later on in the game.

I'm fine with a new protagonist personally.

I'm usually not a fan of when a series does this and swaps out the lead character, but I'm willing to give Evie the benefit of the doubt to differentiate herself and live up to Eve's legacy.

The biggest thing that bugs me about Stellar Blade: Blood Rain isn't anything about the game itself. It's the reaction to it. No, I'm not talking about the culture war nonsense. I'm talking about all the assumptions people are making about a game we've only seen in one trailer. There are far too many declarative statements about what the game is or isn't and what will or won't see. Speculation is fine, the "sky is falling" stuff is really damned annoying though.

Sadly that's just the state of gaming discourse in 2026; everything is either culture war/grifter bullshit or non-stop dooming and catastrophizing.

I already said my piece about the hypocrisy. Zelda you play as a kid. Most JRPGs you play as teens and Persona 5 itself has a SA teenage victim in a skintight outfit. No one raises an eyebrow.  So at this point I am just looking forward to a hopefully good action game. The rage can fuck off. Not worth getting caught in that black hole.

With the first game announced for Switch 2 and Shift Up saying they're not targeting increased specs, it looks like there's a decent chance this to will make its way to Nintendo's hybrid.

Might not be for some time though as the first game took 5 years to come out and this apparently started dev a year ago, so on the same timescale we'd be looking at a 2029 release.

curl has a new profile pic that's relevant to this thread.

Also, this game does look good. But even with the footage already shown, I'm thinking 2028 at the earliest. 

Changed it cos sadly Fatal Frame 2 Remake kinda let me down, so I didn't feel like having it as my avatar any more haha

Made it Eve to celebrate the series continuing with Blood Rain and the first game coming to Switch 2.

2028 would be nice; apparently it started development last year, so I kinda expect more 2029/2030, but I'd be glad to be pleasantly surprised.