This game did something very right with Katarina. They chose an excellent voice actress, for a character that is probably somewhere in her late 20s. Now, so far in Tekken, the age gap in female characters has been tremendous. The bulk of them aren't even above 20, and the other veteran female characters are over 30, but I don't find them appealing. Something about Katarina appeals to me though. Maybe it's the fact that it's a female character who does not have a feminine fighting style. She also has a little bass in her voice and I get a since of a
strong woman instead of
a young girl pretending to look like they are fighting someone.
She looks cool too. Her default costume involves a pair of shades, and her character design is cool as well besides the two attention seekers below her neck.
This is actually why I don't play with female characters in Tekken because most of them appear to be visually weak and their fighting styles makes it seem like they are dancing around, twirling around doing butterfly jumps and flipping all over the place, practicing some kind of extreme yoga acrobatics. There aren't any moves or attacks that Lili, Asuka, Ling, Jun, Michelle do that make me go wow, that looked really powerful, everything appears to be so
light. An exception to this is Nina's Kamehameha wave, I'm sure there are other moves that I'm missing (because there are), and I don't care about anyone looking up moves from female characters saying
look, isn't this powerful?, because that would be missing my point.
Dragunov, Feng, Law, Kazuya, Bryan, Armor King, Heihachi, they all fight like they're trying to break their opponents' bones. This is why I like Katarina, when she attacks I feel like she is actually a fighter. Good job Bandai Namco. I'll say it again because I feel like I can't make this clear enough, the point of this post isn't to bash people that like playing female characters in Tekken, the point is to illustrate how I really think Katarina is a solid character and to show why I've tried to play with female characters in the past and how it just didn't work out. The majority of them fit this
they ain't got no visually powerful attacks tho category to me besides people like Leo, Nina or Julia (some of her moves).
And if you think I'm just being a fuckboi, (and that's cool), here are some examples of female characters in other fighting games that I like playing with.
Now, I know that DOA characters fit the 18 year old pretty girl archetype pretty well, however these are a few characters that I enjoy playing with because I feel like when I play with them, I press a button and they are trying to knock your teeth out.
Did you see that? That piece of shit Lars got the snot kicked out of him!
When Tekken 7 comes out when I turn 52 years old, I'm maining Katarina for a few months, I can't wait.