Playable or Decorative? Ranking How Video Game Franchises Actually Treat Their Female Characters
Let's get something out of the way immediately: this is not a moral lecture, and it's not a hit piece. This is a tier list. We rank things here. And when it comes to how video game franchises handle female characters, the range between 'genuinely impressive' and 'why does her armor have a chest window' is vast enough to build a franchise in.
Anime has spent years developing the art of the complex female character — sometimes brilliantly, sometimes frustratingly, but at least with visible effort. Gaming, which has been a mainstream entertainment medium for decades now, has no excuse for still producing franchises that treat women as background decoration with a voice line. Some franchises have figured this out. Others are still in remedial class.
Here's the definitive breakdown.
S-Tier: These Studios Actually Did the Work
Ellie is one of the most fully realized characters in gaming history — full stop. She has wants, fears, contradictions, and a character arc that doesn't exist to serve a male protagonist's story. She is the story. Abby in Part II is even more ambitious: a character designed to make you uncomfortable with your own sympathies, and it works because she's written as a complete human being rather than a symbol. Naughty Dog put in the work here, and it shows in every frame.
Horizon Zero Dawn / Forbidden West
Aloy is competent, curious, occasionally socially awkward in an endearing way, and never once defined by a romantic subplot. Guerrilla Games built a protagonist who happens to be a woman rather than a 'woman protagonist,' which sounds like a small distinction but makes an enormous difference in how the character feels to play. Her arc is about identity and purpose, and it lands. S-Tier.
Samus Aran was doing this in 1986. A bounty hunter in power armor who turned out to be a woman after you beat the game fast enough — Nintendo accidentally created one of gaming's most enduring subversions and then spent decades doing her justice in the mainline games. Samus doesn't need to explain herself. That's the point.
A-Tier: Strong Showings With Room to Grow
Persona Series (4 and 5 specifically)
Atlus writes genuinely interesting female characters — Rise, Makoto, Futaba, and others have real personality and narrative importance. The catch is that the Persona series also hasn't fully shaken its habit of occasionally reducing those same characters to relationship mechanics or anime tropes when the story gets lazy. It's frustrating because the potential is clearly there. A-Tier for the highs; the lows keep it from S.
Mass Effect (original trilogy)
Liara, Tali, Ashley, Samara — BioWare's original trilogy populated its world with women who had histories, motivations, and opinions that existed entirely independent of Shepard. The romance system gets complicated depending on how you feel about it, but the core writing treated female characters as people rather than prizes. A-Tier.
Resident Evil (modern era)
Jill Valentine, Claire Redfield, Lady Dimitrescu (don't act like you forgot) — Capcom has been quietly building a roster of memorable female characters with actual agency. The RE remakes in particular have strengthened the writing for characters like Claire and Jill considerably. Still some legacy cheese in the design department, but the trajectory is upward.
B-Tier: Trying, Not Always Succeeding
Final Fantasy
Square Enix has produced some of gaming's most iconic female characters — Terra, Lightning, Aerith, Tifa — and also some of gaming's most frustrating examples of wasted potential. The franchise swings wildly. Lightning is genuinely compelling. Other entries lean on tragic backstory and aesthetic design over character substance. B-Tier because the floor is high and the ceiling is inconsistent.
Overwatch
Blizzard's shooter launched with an unusually diverse and visually distinct roster of women, and the lore genuinely tried to give them personality. The execution in-game has always been more focused on role than character, and the franchise's real-world controversies have made it hard to evaluate the writing in isolation. B-Tier: good intentions, complicated execution.
C-Tier: The Effort Was Minimal at Best
Street Fighter
Chun-Li is iconic and has been for thirty years. The series also has a habit of designing female characters around visual impact first and narrative purpose somewhere much further down the list. Cammy's design has been a meme about priorities for decades. The fighting game genre broadly struggles with this, and Street Fighter is representative of the problem. C-Tier.
Tekken
Similar situation. Nina Williams is legitimately cool. The series also has a history of female character designs that suggest the development team had very specific priorities that weren't 'narrative complexity.' C-Tier, with acknowledgment that some entries try harder than others.
D-Tier: Decorative and Proud of It
Dead or Alive
The franchise literally shipped a game called Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball. There is a dedicated physics engine. The series has never pretended to be something it isn't, which is almost admirable, but 'at least they're honest about it' is not a tier list defense. D-Tier.
Most Classic JRPG Isekai-Adjacent Franchises
You know the ones. The ones where the female party member's entire personality is 'supportive and in love with the protagonist' and her armor is a metal bikini in a world full of snowstorms. These franchises know what they're doing. The audience knows what they're doing. D-Tier for everyone involved.
The Bigger Picture
Here's what's interesting: the franchises sitting in S and A-Tier aren't there because they made a political statement. They're there because they wrote good characters. Ellie and Aloy and Samus work because they're interesting, not because they check a box. The franchises in D-Tier aren't failing at representation — they're failing at characterization, which is a craft problem more than anything else.
Anime figured this out unevenly but at least has decades of examples to study. Gaming has the same examples available and still produces franchises that treat female characters like furniture with a health bar. The gap is closing — slowly, messily, with occasional backsliding — but the S-Tier proves it's possible.
The rest of the industry just needs to take notes.
