A lot of big, technically-impressive new games were unveiled at E3 2016, but the one that has fans most hyped is the latest fart-filled RPG extravaganza, South Park: The Fractured but Whole. For the most part, The Fractured but Whole looks fairly similar to 2014’s The Stick of Truth (which is a good thing), but it will introduce a variety of tweaks and new features. One of those improvements is the ability to make your main character either a boy or girl.
Being able to choose your gender in an RPG is common, but most games treat it as a mere aesthetic difference. Aside from people using different pronouns when talking to you, gameplay and story usually doesn’t change. Of course, that’s not really South Park‘s style. Social/political/gender/whatever commentary is at the heart of what South Park does, and they’re not afraid to hit on touchy subjects, so which gender you choose in The Fractured but Whole will have a major effect on how your character is treated. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Trey Parker and Matt Stone talked about the process of adding girls to the game:
“You can be a girl. Very revolutionary. Very 2016 of us. In Stick of Truth, The Girls were a faction in the fantasy world. And then someone’s like, ‘What if you want to be a girl?’ Narratively, it didn’t work. We’d have to sh*tcan the whole game. So we just left it the way it was. This time, we obviously wanted to add that.
But the boys are little boys, because it’s really a story about little boys running around. So they don’t care about your character being a girl? That seems weird. They always seemed to care about it in the show. Are they dumb about it, and they don’t know? So you’re in hiding? Or do they totally care about that, and totally treat you differently? So we ended up doing those things differently for different characters. It actually turned out to be quite a bit more work.”
Aside from it just being a nice option, the role of women in superhero movies is a subject ripe for commentary, so it should be fun to see Stone and Parker’s take it on. Just know that if you pick a girl character, you’re probably going to have to play through an extra boss fight against Cartman to be included in the toy line.
South Park: The Fractured but Whole arrives Dec. 7.
(Via Kotaku)