STRONG FEMALE LEAD: Top 10 Feminist Videogame Characters

Move over guys. Breaking boundaries and smashing stereotypes all of their own,  that’s what Platform is all about and we have picked out the best of the best PLAYABLE female gaming characters, while avoiding the cliches of needing-a-man-to-save-her Princess Peach or born-into-privilege Lara Croft (she has a butler for goodness sake). Take a look at our pick of the top ten feminist queens to slay your screen.

1. Ellie – The Last of Us
In the original The Last of Us, this openly gay teenager created a stir for being a survivor, albeit a sidekick to the older male lead. In the E3 sequel, The Last of Us Part II, Ellie is the main protagonist. Please note her as a heroine on the rise.  

2. Grace Walker – Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus
The first time you meet Grace, she has a gun pointed at famed Nazi-killer Billy J. Blazkowicz’s face and asks, “Just who the f*ck are you, white boy?” Bombate’s story in The New Order face some of the difficulties that black men face the world over, but Grace’s experience as a Black woman in America is a vastly different one.

3. Lola – Afterparty
Even though she’s trapped in Hell, Lola stays a sharp-witted, down to earth black woman in overalls who doesn’t have time for anyone’s BS. Afterparty is a game powered by conversations and characters, and Lola’s perspective always makes situations more interesting. IGN says “it was a nice touch to have Lola able to go off about social justice throughout the game.”

4. Bangalore – Apex Legends
Bangalore, aka Anita Williams, is the certified badass of the Apex Legends crew. She’s a soldier and while her kit isn’t showy, it proves that the basics still hit hard. “From playing mind games with the smokescreen to running laps around your enemies before bombarding them from space, Bangalore is a formidable opponent and a great choice for the Apex Legends games.” says IGN.

5. Billie Lurk – Dishonored
First seen in Dishonored 2, and moved into a starring role in the expansion pack, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, the Dreadful Wale’s captain is arguably, per GameSpot, “the most cunning and deceptive assassin in the Dishonored series.”

6. Aveline de Grandpre – Assassin’s Creed
With Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation, Aveline became the action series’ first playable female assassin. GameSpot called the 18th-century, Bayou-based rogue “both adept and brutal in her use of weapons, like the cleaver-shaped sugarcane machete.”

7. Faith Connors – Mirror’s Edge
This determined courier from the first-person action-adventure game is, according to Complex, one of the “most badass video game characters of all-time.”

8. Chun-Li – Street Fighter
When she unleashed martial-arts fury in Street Fighter II, Chun-Li became the “first female playable character in fighting game history,” per IGN. In doing so, according to UGO.com, she proved women protagonists “could fight just as same as their male counterparts.”

9. Samus Aran – Metroid
In 1986, the original players of Metroid didn’t know until the end of their journey that the armored bounty hunter at the center of the sci-fi action was, in fact, one of gaming’s pioneering female power characters.

10. Joanna Dark – Perfect Dark
The namesake of this shooter game is a spy who can really shoot. It’s not for nothing that Entertainment Weekly says of the character, “When James Bond goes to sleep, he dreams of being Joanna Dark.”

 

Smash through all kinds of ceilings whilst planning one of these badass female characters!

Get the crew together and explore these games at Platform! 

 

 

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