Stellar Blade is perhaps one of the most highly anticipated games for the PlayStation 5 ever since its re-reveal during State of Play back in 2022; with its AAA quality and life-like graphics, there’s one thing that the internet has gone up in arms about, and that’s the model of the game’s main character.

Following the announcement of the game’s delay to 2024, Stellar Blade is garnering up traction due to how its protagonist – Eve had looked like.

This led to mixed reactions from the community, with some praising the model’s high-fidelity and realistic appearance, while others had complained the model to be oversexualised , saying it has “unrealistic” proportions and no real person would look like that.

People point out the factors that made Eve’s character model feel fake are mainly in the thighs and hip area, body features that are often highlighted for sex appeal.

This isn’t the first time that Shift Up, the company behind Stellar Blade, had been under fire for their “unrealistic” depiction of female characters, considering they’re the same developers behind NIKKE: Goddess of Victory, another game that had received its fair share of controversy regarding its character designs.

Given their past reputation, it’s easy to pin the blame on Shift Up considering there’s characters such as Emma or Tia who didn’t have any controversy per say, but it’s obvious how wacky and unrealistic their proportions are, and how it over-accentuating specific body features.

However, it turns out that according to Twitter user ShiftUpWorld, an account that covers updates regarding Shift Up’s titles, had shared how Stellar Blade’s protagonist is actually based on a full 3D digital scan of a Korean model, Shin Jae-eun.

The tweet shared evidence of the model during a 3D scanning session, which showed off the similarities between Shin Jae-eun and the Stellar Blade protagonist, Eve.

Real Versus Unique

When people talk about “realistic” proportions, more often than not they don’t actually mean it, case in point with Alloy from Horizon Zero Dawn, or MJ from Insomniac’s Spider-Man games, whose real-life face model got harassed by fans because the in-game character looked “ugly”.

However, both of said character models were also digitally scanned, which brings in the question as to why fans mainly raise their complaints to Western developers.

People don’t actually want characters with real proportions but instead, characters that are “unique”. Examples of this scenario being character designs such as 2B from NieR Automata, or Bayonetta from the series of the same name.

In the case of 2B, her character design is generally adorn by the public considering how the character always makes an appearance in various other games, such as in Final Fantasy XIV, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege, and even NIKKE.

Point being, games nowadays are often unrealistic anyways and it’s a medium where anyone can make just about anything. We’ve seen people explore interesting takes on characters, from Baldur’s Gate 3’s tall devil hellspawn lady in Karlach, to short gnome-like creatures in lalafells in Final Fantasy XIV, it’s generally more enticing to look at unique and cool character designs as opposed to yet another grizzled and stoic “army man”.

Even if Eve’s character model wasn’t body scanned, that doesn’t mean that she’s badly designed because at the end of the day, a tall android lady that gets the job done is still pretty rad.

Stellar Blade

Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment

Developer: SHIFT UP

Release Date: 2024-04-26

PlayStation 5

Humanity is driven from Earth after a losing war against alien invaders called NA:tive. To reclaim their lost home, Eve and her squad are deployed from the Colony to fight the NA:tive and to take back Earth.