Mass Effect 2: Flawed is the New Beautiful

A new entry to the RPG blog over at 1UP tells us how BioWare intentionally gave Mass Effect 2’s Miranda a couple of minor imperfections, despite her otherwise obvious “sex-bomb look”.

BioWare has done something clever with its character designs: They’ve turned flaws into an asset. Take, for instance, the character to the right (and also featured on the game’s cover), Miranda. She’s clearly designed to have the typical sex-bomb look, what with her skin-tight outfit and beestung lips and high-performance cleavage window. But instead of trying to design her as a perfect supermodel, BioWare made her deliberately imperfect: When she talks, you may notice that she’s slightly bucktoothed.

It’s a minor detail, sure, but it’s one that really stood out to me. It suggests that BioWare is deliberately playing up the occasional ugliness of its player characters. There’s something about the addition of a little physical detail like this that helps sell the aesthetic of the entire game. Miranda is clearly intended to conform to a Hollywood standard of beauty, but she’s limited by the technology and design of the game’s visual style. At first she looks a bit off, just like everyone else in the game, but then you notice that her teeth are a little too big, and somehow that makes the other quirks of her design and animation feel less out-of-place.