I had to look up Phantasy Star to be sure. Apparently only the first game had a female heroine, followed by four sequels with male main characters (Online lets you play as a girl, though).
Are you saying you're not happy with that, and you want the majority of games to have female leads? Are you saying you want an exact 50% gender ratio? What's your goal here? What's the problem?
Primarily I was just disputing the assertion that female main characters aren't rare. They are rare, and as evidence I pointed out that about half the provided examples were not good examples of female main characters being common.
Of course I'm not saying there needs to be a 50-50 split, even ideally. I'm just saying that they're currently rare, and often targeted at men anyway.
I do eventually imply that I'm unhappy with the situation. I would like more strong female characters for strong women to play as and be inspired or entertained by. Too many strong female characters are bizarrely large breasted and underclothed, and we know exactly why. It's immersion breaking. *I* don't want to play as some teenager's wank-fuel. It's downright offensive to ME that the developers think I, as a guy, require every woman to look like this.
I cannot boycott every game containing unnecessarily sexy women because that is almost every game out there. I would like to enjoy triple A titles sometimes, and Valve releases so rarely. I'm forced to compromise, and avoid the worst offenders - and complain on internet forums apparently.
There's still a problem now, but it was worse back then.
...what is the problem? Exactly what? The point of my post you responded to was to demonstrate that there are, and pretty much always have been games with female protagonists. That entire train of thought started when Vector implied that there weren't many games with female leads, which is clearly demonstrably incorrect.
There are lots of games with female leads. Yes, there are lots games with male leads too. A majority, even. But if you want to play as a girl, there's no problem at all finding a game that will accommodate you.
Does everyone agree on this?
To be fair, we're talking about whether something is "rare" or whether there are "lots". We really just have a difference of opinion.
I do get the impression that you are overestimating the amount of female protagonists. Even that list of supposedly female-dominated games contained more males than females.
Because if so...then again, what exactly is the problem? Are people seriously complaining about the fact that games with male leads exist?
Nope, no one is saying that.
Is the problem that people just arbitrarily don't like the ratio? Why? Why does that need to be a problem? If you want to play a girl, you can. If you want to play a boy, you can. If you want to play strong woman who's the master of her own fate, you can. If you want to play a strong man who rescues helpless girls and gets smooches for it, you can.
Everyone is being catered to.
Do you ever wish that there were more games of a certain type? Have you ever been excited about a new game coming out?
Now imagine your game collection is 10% as large, and you have to wait ten times as long before a new game you're actually eager for is released. It's not that the game industry is small or lazy, just that 90% of the games out there feature gigantic throbbing penises or something. For the sake of this example I'm going to assume that would be a distraction to you, and make it hard to get invested in the game. A lot of people don't even *want* the penises, but they keep buying because they like video games. You can either settle for the 10% of games that pander to you, or you can give in and fund more penis productions. (You'll probably have better luck with indie games, which is great if you don't need the production values, support, and online communities that come with triple-A titles)
And every time you speak online you lose all credibility because "guys don't play games" (because of all the penises). Be ready for everyone to ask for pics, too, as if you could hope to compare with the ones in-game. Get disgusted and avoid multiplayer altogether (hey, it's a vicious cycle!)