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The recently released Resident Evil: Revelations demo for the Nintendo 3DS has an awful lot of sex appeal crammed into it. Considering the experience runs around 15 minutes, I was a bit shocked at how much of Jill Valentine’s figure I saw.
The demo begins with a close-up shot and pan over our heroine’s whole body -- dressed in some revealing, skin-tight body armor -- as she lays unconscious on a bed in a disheveled room. I already feel like some creepy voyeur, and I haven’t even started playing yet. Jill wakes up and radios her comrade, Parker, to tell him she’s unsure of where she is. Soon after, a blood-thirsty monster bursts out of the closet where it was lurking this whole time.
Just going off of the demo, we obviously lack the proper context of how this section fits into the larger game, but it does make me wonder what Jill had to endure before this point. If she wasn't armed and dangerous, I would think this was the intro to some kind of digital, creature-on-girl snuff porn.
As she runs -- under the player’s control -- she moves away from the “over the shoulder” framing just enough for us to see her entire behind, accentuated not just by her leggings but also by the 3D effect. How much attention did the developer put into making sure the curves of her body really popped with the 3D cranked up?
Speaking of which: Jill is a woman. She has breasts. OK, we get it. But does she really need to have them pushed up like that to show off so much cleavage in the cut scenes? The gal is stuck on an abandoned cruise ship with a couple of dudes and a bunch of monsters. Who does she need to impress? In fact, it’s cold, and she’s out in the middle of the ocean, so I would imagine she’d want to button up a bit more.
Jill’s revealing attire gives an eerie subtext to what the monsters’ true intentions might be as they lunge towards her. It also leaves the target-male-demographic player at the weird crossroads of gawking at this woman while helping her fight to survive. Obviously, this isn’t a new motif for the series (Ada Wong, Jill in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, and Sheva Alomar come to mind); I just felt it necessary to comment on how prevalent I found it this time around.
Jill’s always been a tough character. She can shoot, stab, and kick with the best of them. But this demo’s camera appears to be stuck on male-gaze mode.
