Are FromSoftware’s female NPCs an afterthought, or the whole point?

In 2016, Matt Kim is frank: “Dark Souls loves a specific type of woman. [They’re] demure, somber, and a little strange…They appear in each of the games, and are generally interchangeable.” This idea resurfaced recently in a Polygon piece, wherein Nico Deyo extends Kim’s analysis to Malenia, arguing that despite being Elden Ring’s enigmatic girl boss, she, too, is born from the stereotypical and reductive feminine ilk.

Sure, you can find outliers to the pattern—particularly in the Lands Between—but there's no doubt it exists. Critics of the trope consider it reductive, even sexist: that the aloof nature of the women renders them into blank surfaces serving only to reflect the Player’s journey.

Initially, I wasn't sure why this anodyne take on a Japanese video game developer gave me such a headache. Now I see it as a sort of perfect storm: for one, a textbook example of what happened to game criticism when feminist thought hit Buzzfeed in the 2010's and everyone raced to decry any rendering of women that wasn't Strong. Secondly, it's a bizarre dismissal of the high-level architectural thought that FromSoft is otherwise lauded for.

Here's what I think. The depiction of women across the FromSoft catalog is not reductive or sexist. The women are of-the-world. They are creepy, quiet and inaccessible because they are embodiments of environments that are creepy, quiet and inaccessible. Moreover, the central tension of each game relies on this being true.

1. The knower, the known

When I say that FromSoft’s women are of-the-world, I mean they are both stewards to their environments and inextricable from them. From Demon Souls to Elden Ring, the player enters the world towards its end. We play with the tea leaves of eras past and strive to read them. In Visceral Femininity, YouTuber HoneyBat recontextualizes Bloodborne as a story of Motherhood; of menstruation, childbirth, and sexual trauma. She points out that The Great Ones require a female host, and that the blood we inject ourselves with as we slice through the catacombs is likely menstrual blood. Across every game, it is women who translate the obscurities of the world to us: The Doll, Melina, The Finger Reading Crones, The Fire Keeper, etc—because it is they who know it, deeply.

2. A chill down the spine

The Souls games are ludonarratives: their lore is expressed through environmental rather than overt storytelling. The Player can learn about the world by eking out clues left in item descriptions and obscure NPC ramblings, but it’s entirely possible to finish the entirety of the catalog without understanding much at all about their bizarre evironments. Whether the Player maintains this blindness or painstakingly scrambles to assemble the story, the sense of alienation persists.

The source of this paradigmatic FromSoft feeling is not obvious. Inaccessibility plays a large role, although several AAA releases from the past decade were also riddled with obscure secrets and overwhelming maps. Player-as-Arthur Morgan probably won’t solve every single mystery in RDR2, but there’s still a sense that he belongs to the world. As does Player-as-Geralt of Rivia, Player-as-AC protagonist, and so on.

Maybe, then, it’s the hostility. A central feature of FromSoft’s environs is that everything yearns to—and likely will—smite you at every turn. Yet hostility also fails as a complete explanation. We’re threatened, for example, by the aggressive terrors of Resident Evil 4 or The Callisto Protocol; so much so that feeling separate from them isn’t distinctly concerning.

We can string a few more nouns on this chain of deduction, but here’s where I suspect it ends: the alienating force lies in the gap between the fingers of the Player and the fingers of the women/world. It’s an incredibly unique feeling as far as game design goes, and I don’t think any other studio has achieved anything close to it.

3. So what?

My point is that FromSoft’s female NPC’s are not shy, demure and mysterious because Japanese businessmen think they’d make good body pillows to sell at Comic Con. Rather, they’re designed with the same level of detail and care that everything else is. And as a result of this care, they are profoundly unique, haunting and memorable characters that are the lifeblood of the games. If I wanted to put a fighter in the 2015 Buzzfeed ring, I could go so far as to say that considering traditionally feminine characteristics inherently bad is…well, sexist. But fear not, that’s not really what I care about. I care about playing in the muck of the obscure worlds that FromSoftware built for us—about reading what the tea leaves truly say, not merely what they appear to.