On its surface, Autumn Games’ Skullgirls looks an awful lot like the sketchier kind of Japanese fighting game. You know, the one where the entire cast consists of teenaged girls with big boobs and small skirts, bouncing improbably and uncomfortably through one-on-one battles. That’s Skullgirls, at least at a glance. The half-dozen or show characters the developers have revealed so far do a lot of revealing all on their own (wink wink nudge nudge), all in lavish, hand-drawn, high-definition artwork running at a slick 60 frames per second. That’s a lot of detailed panty-flashing.
After spending half an hour with the game recently at New York Comic-Con, though, I was pleased to learn that there’s much more to Skullgirls than lovingly rendered titillation. In fact, the fan-servicey bits do something of a disservice to the game. It’s easy to make quick assumptions about a game that features a cast of female grapplers who mostly boast ample proportions, but the truth of Skullgirls is that it’s crammed with far more care, detail, and consideration than any sleazy Japanese brawler I’ve ever seen (not that I’m much of an expert or anything).
