Suppose this character did have a pot belly, is the only purpose of a female character's appearance to please sexual preferences?
Ermm Yes! You can call me shallow if it makes you feel better.
To conform to societal expectations of beauty?
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I bet you get upset when any women undresses...
Ripley's PantiesI apologise, but I feel we are talking at cross-purposes, here. I do not believe you are shallow. I just think you err on the side of seeing women as sexual objects instead of people, given you just said "Yes" to the question "Is the only purpose of a female character's appearance to please sexual preferences?" without any caveats at all.
I would agree that beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder, although I'm not quite sure what relevance that has to this discussion. Neither do I see the need for a personal attack based on your hypothesis concerning my feelings about women in states of undress? I am assuming you just lashed out at me because I used your message as an example, for which I am sorry, I did not mean to 'target' you personally.
Also, I hope you will stand for your [artistic] vision and won't lean under the slightest wind of nonsensical complains and "arguments" about "how unrealistic your videogame is", haha.
I may be wrong, but I don't think anyone has critiqued the realism of the game. Overall people (including me!) seem really excited about this game and find its artwork beautiful! The only thing is that some of us find the overall piece is detracted from by (what appears to be) the main character removing their trousers before the game has even started.
It seems that the only reason for this graphical design decision is either:
A) Some plot-related thing that we don't know about yet, in which case all of us complaining will have to eat our own words, or
B) Perhaps a technical/art based reason, such as giving the character sprite enough contrast for jumping into the suit, grey trousers jumping into a grey suit would be hard to see (although I'd like to think alternative solutions exist), or
C) The female character is having its gender exploited to take advantage of what may be predominantly a male, heterosexual audience.
At the end of the day, this is a few pixels for a few hundred milliseconds on the menu-screen, and I appreciate that this may seem an overreaction. It's just that little things like this add up to the way people perceive women, and the way we relate to female characters.
There is nothing wrong with sexuality being expressed in games, but the way in which it is done can say very different things. I think as a medium we need to be wary of what messages we're sending out on these topics.