9 Hilariously Ugly Video Game Babes We All Had Crushes On

Whatever you do, don't revisit Final Fantasy VII. Tifa hasn't aged well...

They say donning a pair of nostalgia-goggles can make things look far more appealing than they were at the time, but that's not considering the absolutely delusional power of a horny teenager's mind. Coupled with a young imagination and the many surrounding worldly influences flooding in at a mile a minute, we gamers could take any old stack of pixels in the vaguest shape of something sultry, and make it sexy as hell. Over the years developers would curtail to this wanton desire in all sorts of ways, ranging from the chest-heavy likes of Leisure Suit Larry and Dead or Alive (the latter coming complete with aptly-named 'Breast Physics'), through to more respectably sexy femme fatales like The Witcher 3's trio of Ciri, Triss and Yennefer, or the reimagined versions of Lara Croft and the Mortal Kombat ladies. It's one hell of a ride to get to this point though, and in the process of forever refining the 'perfect look' for the female form, there have definitely been some polygonal atrocities committed over the years - but don't let that fool you into thinking we didn't think they were stunning all the same. Many of the entries here are still totally attractive on some weird base level of accentuated sexual features, but man... the various ways developers brought them to life, their blocky and disturbing character models and many a PR push gave every single one an overtone of forgoing personality and going all slack-jawed as you gawped for hours on end, making them pretty inherently ugly all the same. Ready to question everything you thought you knew about your younger self? Step right in...
Gaming Editor
Gaming Editor

WhatCulture's Head of Gaming.