Leslie in accounting just added a Martin Luther King Jr. quote to her email signature template which can only mean one thing: it’s Black History Month. Yes, it’s that time of year where students in elementary school will spend a solid 30 minutes learning about Rosa Parks and then enjoy a peanut butter sandwich because of George Washington Carver. At least that’s what we did at my white-ass elementary school. And if you think that’s an ignorant way to look at black history in America, you should know that at my middle school, we had a “slave run day” where members of the eighth-grade class were divided up into two groups: runaway slaves and slave catchers. On this day, the “slaves” would get 15 minutes to find a hiding spot in the school, after which the catchers would go around looking for them for 15 minutes, only able to search if they had the permission of the teacher of the classroom or office worker. The process would repeat throughout the day and at the end of school, any “slaves” not caught would be considered to have reached freedom in the North. That’s right, our lesson in the Underground Railroad was a day of hide-and-seek.
What does that have to do with black video game characters? Absolutely nothing, but it’s a little bit of ridiculousness from my past that there is no better time of sharing then right now. Because just as my school clearly got teaching black history wrong, the video game developers don’t have the best history of creating black characters. From racist-ass NES games out of Japan to the white-nonsense that was slave ship Tetris, some developers just don’t get it. But others do and that’s who we’re here to talk about today.
Just as I did with female characters for Women’s History Month and male characters for International Men’s Day, I asked my fellow Destructoid editors to sound off on their favorite black video game characters. While I’m sure those names listed below are all fine in their own standing, I’m going to go out on a limb and say whoever they write about can’t be as good as Shinobu from No More Heroes.
Suda51’s masterstroke on the Wii resonates still with its punk aesthetics, piss-in-the-wind attitude, and a cast of certified case studies. The series is a straight-up banger. I maintain Suda51 is the single best character creator coming out of Japan with this game as yet another reason in the long list of why. Every villain in No More Heroes is a brilliantly deranged but Shinobu is so broken I think I like her more than the protagonist.
Originally an opponent of Travis Touchdown, Shinobu is out for blood believing he is responsible for her father’s death. She’s heartless, as demonstrated -- spoiler alert -- when she kills all the witnesses to Travis’s challenge of her. You almost feel sorry for her, a teenager living a secret life as an assassin because some jackass with a laser sword killed her father so many years ago. She’s turned off her heart and cast out her soul, leaving her an empty vessel for vengeance. Yeah, she saves Travis near the end of the game, but she’s no hero otherwise the game would have been called Still One Hero.
Shinobu could have easily fallen into the trap writers use when they want to reform a former enemy. She could have started to grow, started to feel again. She could have tried to make amends for all the innocents she’s slaughtered. But that wouldn’t be punk. Instead, she grows even more insane. After killing her way across Asia, she returns to Santa Destroy completely infatuated with Travis. She transfers her crazy dedication from her father to him, trying to wrangle Travis into a sexual master/apprentice relationship that creeps even him out. And Travis is pretty much the type of person to make PornHub his homepage.
She's cold, she's crazy, and I absolutely love her. This assassin’s journey isn’t done yet, and while I don’t anticipate her showing up in Travis Strikes Again if No More Heroes 3 does get made, Shinobu damn well better make an appearance.
via destructoid https://www.destructoid.com/it-s-black-history-month-so-let-s-talk-about-our-favorite-black-video-game-characters-486397.phtml