Top Videogames with Female Protagonists?

Which are your favourite videogames with female protagonists?

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  • Horizon Zero Dawn
  • Super Metroid
  • Tomb Raider saga (specially the reboot trilogy)
  • Bayonetta 1 & 2
  • Lollipop Chainsaw
  • Final Fantasy VI
  • Final Fantasy XIII-2
  • Fatal Frame saga
  • Parasite Eve
  • Resident Evil 3: Nemesis
  • Okami
  • Gravity Rush
  • NieR: Automata
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Not sure I can add any more then what Sir L already put! Pretty much nailed it @Sir_Laguna !

I’d add Beyond Good and Evil and Mirror’s Edge!

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  • KiKi KaiKai series – (Sayo-chan, AKA Pocky)
  • Phantasy Star – (Alis)
  • Aleste series – (Ellinor)
  • Puyo Puyo series – (Arle Nadja)
  • Cotton series
  • Space Channel 5 – (Ulala)
  • Beyond Good and Evil – (Jade)
  • Fatal Frame 2 – (Mio Amakura)
  • Yume Nikki – (Madotsuki)
  • Recettear: An Item Shop Tale – (Recette)
  • Gravity Rush – (Kat)
  • Hatsune Miku series
  • VA-11 Hall-A – (Jill)
  • Tales of Berseria – (Velvet)
  • Nier Automata (2B)

Oh, and can’t forget the one who is (arguably) the original, Ms. Pac-Man. I’ll give a shout-out to the classic Sega Ninja (AKA Ninja Princess) as well, starring the ninja princess Kurumi.

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Shantae from the Shantae games and any of the female protagonists from the Assassin’s Creed games.

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Yes! Gravity Rush, I forgot I own this on Vita. Thank you for the reminder!

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I don’t know many that haven’t been mentioned.
Hat Kid from A Hat in Time
Madeline from Celeste
Ori from Ori and the Blind Forest
Fool from Sayonara Wild Hearts

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  • Mea Borowski from Night in the Woods
  • Shepard from Mass Effect (FemShep is the real Shepard)
  • Clementine in The Walking Dead
  • Both Max and Chloe from Life is Strange
  • Kassandra from AC: Odyssey
  • Both Chloe and Nadine in Uncharted: Lost Legacy
  • Billie Lurk from Dishonored: Death of the Outsider
  • GLaDOS from Portal 2 (let’s face it GLaDOS is the real protagonist)
  • Alice from Alice: Madness Returns
  • everyone from Skullgirls
  • Ajna from Indivisible
  • Samantha from Gone Home (also Katie)
  • Amy from Tacoma
  • Edith from What Remains of Edith Finch
  • Nilin from Remember Me
  • The Princess/Dancer in Bound
  • Ness and Demelza from Knights and Bikes
  • Claire from A Short Hike
  • Thora from Jotun
  • Cadence from Crypt of the Necrodancer
  • Florence from Florence
  • Gris from Gris
  • Scarlett from Blackwood Crossing
  • Auk from AER
  • Amanda Ripley from Alien: Isolation
  • Nuna from Never Alone
  • Alex from Oxenfree
  • Anne Tarver from Virginia

I’m sure I have more I can add later.

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I almost always play RPGs with a female player character if I can, so if we are counting those, then Dragon Age: Origins comes to mind.

But beside those, I’ve just checked my Played Shelf and ordered from top to bottom and one of the first ones that popped up was No One Lives Forever, which is a FANTASTIC 20-year-old game, which is lead by my favourite protagonist in recent memory. Also on that list, The Longest Journey, Portal (2), Transistor and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

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thank you for all your recommendations! :slight_smile:

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Still my favorite

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Pretty much, yeah.

Although I might add that Cate Archer from the second game is much more bland and uninteresting than Cate Archer from the first one.

Damn, I was too late! All my favourites are taken, so here are some others:

Momodora: Reverie Under The Moonlight
Heaven’s Vault
Control
Heavenly Sword
The Last of Us: Left Behind
Perfect Dark
Cibele

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This may not exactly qualify as you get the choice but I never played as the male version of Commander Shepard in theMass Effect: Trilogy and instead opted to play the often titled “Fem Shep” instead, and while I cannot speak for the experience as the other, I can state that I found the voice acting to be awesome and just completely badass to play through the series as a character which I would states is a strong, and somewhat real female character in a video game as compared to so many representations in various games where it’s basically a palette swap or an opportunity to showcase the character to the male gaze or as a form of something sexual to look at for the play through.

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I replayed the first game two years ago so my memories of it are pretty fresh but I can not recall many details of the second one (beside fast ninja ladies and a flying house).
I liked that the writers gave Cate a few character flaws like her cockiness and most importantly they acknowledged that Cate is a woman. There are a lot of female protagonists who are written like men with boobs what make these characters much more uninteresting.

I played it both a couple of months ago and I don’t blame you for not remembering much of the second game. It’s disappointingly bland overall. But relevant to our discussion is that they don’t give Cate anything to do or say.

In the first game she’s a ultracompetent woman being constantly diminished by her colleges. Besides the overall spy plot, she has the personal quest of earning the respect she deserves; she has a strong personality and a point of view. She also has awesome lines bashing the misogyny around her (such as “The point of women’s liberation is to allow young ladies to become whatever they please.”).

In the second game, she has almost no internal life aside from being a spy. Her spot on U.N.I.T.Y. is held solidly and no one challenges her for being a woman. She has no arc, no interesting quips, nothing. She could’ve been replaced by any other character (male or female) and the game wouldn’t have changed a bit.

I don’t feel that having a female protagonist that could easily be gender-swapped is a bad thing at all. There are some characters whose gender is integral to them (such as Cate Archer) but others for which that’s not the case. And that’s completely fine. Otherwise, I feel we would be falling into the trap of thinking that “male” is the default and asking for justification for a female character. I mean, take any male character that you love and whose actions are not tied to his gender, swap him, and you have a great female character.

Take, for example, GLaDOS and Cave Johnson. They are both great characters in their games and their genders could be swapped without making them less interesting.

Jesse from control is another example (for me it wasn’t such a memorable character, but it was mentioned in this thread). She and his brother could literally be gender-swapped without even changing their names (a fact that is even mentioned in the game).

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Yep, loved that. And that the writer didn’t forget that she is beginner at the start of the game. So you get a nice hero’s journey.

I know why writers do that but at the same time IMHO it prevents to give the character a lot of details. And a character without many details appears bland quickly.

I didn’t get that impression. While she was considered a beginner by her peers, she was actually overqualified. She has encyclopedic knowledge of UNITI’s enemies and was able to survive the most elaborate deadly traps, even going so far as falling out of a plan un injured.

Yes, but there’s a lot to a character that can be fleshed out which isn’t affected by their gender.

I meant it’s obviously the start of her career as a field agent. Her bosses even seek the help of the traitor because they doubted her qualities as a agent. Maybe the game had pretty big focus on her gender.

Absolutely. I think I’ve misread the title of the thread. When you are just looking for good video games with female protagonists then I’m sure there are thousands.

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