10 Video Game Clichés That We Secretly Love

It's fair to say that the overwhelming majority of video game characters are designed more for fashion than function: above all else, publishers want their games to feature characters who immediately catch a potential customer's eye.

And so, the annals of gaming are littered with examples of hilariously over-designed characters, who while looking cool or sexy, have no practical applications whatsoever.

This trope is admittedly skewed heavily to the detriment of women: Jill Valentine wears a ridiculous dress-skirt combo in the original Resident Evil 3, Final Fantasy X's Lulu sports an immodest corset that's held up by nothing more than some belts, and Soul Calibur's Ivy may as well be wearing nothing, honestly.

In the male stakes, the worst offender surely has to be most of the Assassin's Creed protagonists, who typically wear hoods that block out a good deal of their peripheral vision. Not great when you're trying to watch your six.

In each of these examples, the clothing makes the character decidedly more susceptible to injury in the heat of combat, and while the aforementioned designs are all ridiculous and mostly pandering (if not sexist), it's also such a widespread practise as to be rather hilarious.

As such, you'd probably miss it if artists and designers suddenly gave all video game characters sensible clothes.