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DiscussionTIL that a woman who goes by the pseudonym Kinu Nishimura has been part of Capcom's main art team since the 1990s. Nishimura has done character design and illustration for the Street Fighter series among many others.
Source: https://capcom.fandom.com/wiki/Kinu_Nishimura
Nishimura claims that the art she is most of proud of is her work on Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow over Mystara. This is notable (at least to me) because that game is the direct inspiration for the Vanillaware's Dragon's Crown. I didn't know that Nishimura had indirect influence over that game, either.
Like I asked when I discovered that the Japanese game company Koei was co-founded by a woman, why did it take this long to learn about this very accomplished woman? Granted, Nishimura with her pseudonym seems like a very private person who may not want the attention, and I don't follow fighting games much, so this seems easier to slip by without notice than the Koei discovery did. But still, you'd think this would be more widely known in the gaming community, especially after 10+ years of "women in gaming" articles and podcasts. What did they spend those ten years talking about?
Street Fighter 2's god-tier soundtrack was also 95% composed by another woman who still makes great music.
Edit: I just realized that every theme song above accompanied female-designed characters.
TIL. Thank you for sharing this. I'm trying to learn to more about women's contributions to gaming in the 1990s and earlier since I don't hear this talked about much anywhere.
Ayano Koshiro served as art director for the Streets of Rage series in addition to many other games. The SoR2 dev team kept a SFII arcade cabinet in the office because they wanted to emulate the crunchy gameplay and Nishimura's art style. They succeeded to the point they pole-axed Capcom's Final Fight series. Streets of Rage 2 is arguably perfect as it was the first non-platformer console game to outright eclipse its arcade competition. Ayano Koshiro also co-founded the Ancient game studio with her composer brother Yuzo.
OT: Yuzo is my personal favorite Japanese VG composer. He and his assistant accidentally invented dubstep when fucking around with the Genesis's synth chip's error noises for Streets of Rage 3. His tracks are generally dancier than Shimomura's but less epic and beautiful. Synthetic vs. orchestral.
V cool. I wonder if any particular characters were exclusively Her work.
I rlly want to know the backstory behind "Her blood type is A", but, at the same time, maybe I don't •______•
It's a Japanese horoscope thing, nothing nefarious. They're big on the belief that blood type affects personality.
Ahh thanks, I didn't know that. Does the +/– factor count too?
Not that I've seen. Most Japanese people are Rh positive, so general blood type theory just assumes you are also Rh positive. But yeah, they treat blood type the same way we treat astrological signs.
That's wild... I guess I just reflexively stereotype those types (👀) of belief systems as dating back centuries, if not millennia. But ABO blood types were discovered in the twentieth century
You know, I'm not certain! A quick google search doesn't indicate that it does, but I don't know the finer details.
Western gaming publications don't actually care about the games women love and have enjoyed since the beginning of time. Most 'women in gaming' IMO seems to come from nepotism and attempts of selling Western triple-A games that appeal to men.
Many women tend to enjoy Japanese games, since they tend to focus more on things women enjoy. In Japan, girls and boys are both the target audience for video games, because video games are for children.
Western game journalists want us to play woke western things, because their friends made them. So that's what they focus on promoting.
Yeah very few Western-made games are made with women in mind...
They either tend to be aimed at the dudebro dude demographic or they are aimed at wokesters like the latest Dragon Age games...
The only Western-made games that tend to attract a significant female audience and seems to be made more with women in mind is The Sims series let us be honest here...
Are these people actually friends or is it more of an alliance of convenience among fellow predators?
TRUTH