I do not think I'd be friends with Geralt of Rivia. He is often sarcastic, when I'd favor tact and he will threaten violence when I'd prefer to deescalate a situation. And call it a consequence of knowing so much about his aggressively heterosexual sex life, but he has an aura of macho wish fulfillment about him that would probably just come across as pathetic in real life.
Now, just because I don't like him doesn't mean that he's a bad character. It's just I can't shake the feeling that I've stepped into someone else's fantasy. Like, if Geralt were just a bellicose jerk with an ill-timed sense of irony, he'd just be another video game antihero. His personality isn't substantially different than Alex Mercer's, and I loved Prototype.
But there's something about the way he's portrayed that I just can't put my finger on. It's like the game desperately wants to make him into a sex symbol, but not like the kind of sex symbol that is widely lusted after by regular people as a sort of unattainable ideal, but the kind of sex symbol that is a symbolic stand-in for the purest possible expression of heterosexual male sexuality. He's a male sex symbol for men.
So the game starts with a Geralt nude scene, but the whole thing feels like it's setting up an alibi for the inevitable accusations that the game objectifies its female characters. You've got Geralt in a tub, legs splayed and draped over the edge, but the water obscures most of his body. Then he gets out and there's full rear nudity, but his sexy, muscular back is covered in ugly scars. His face is prettier than I remembered, and he cuts a dashing figure in his flowing swashbuckler shirt, so it's credible that he's attractive, but I'm left feeling like the very purpose of his existence is to say to players "this is what it feels like to be an alpha." The fantasy here isn't "hey, let's watch this sexy guy do his thing," it's "play this guy and you can be sexy vicariously."
I didn't really mean to focus on the game's sexual politics so much and so early, but it really does throw them at you right off the bat. Yennifer is there in the opening scene, fully nude, still looking so conventionally beautiful it's like Geralt ordered her out of a catalogue. As you search the chamber for the key to go to the next area, Geralt makes a crack about how all her clothes are black and white, and then she immediately uses that as an excuse to talk about her underwear. Later, you track her down by describing her smell, which isn't inherently sexual, but come on. It's weird. I feel like I need to slowly back out the door and knock before reentering.
Which is a shame, because I think I'm going to like nearly everything else about this game. I was afraid it wasn't going to run on my laptop and I'm certain that I'm seeing close to the ugliest possible version of the game, but even so, it's beautiful. The wide, clear vistas have a gorgeous backdrop of far-off mountains. The foliage is diverse and colorful without crossing the line into the fanciful. And even the in-door areas are lushly decorated in ways that give a very distinct sense of place. Geralt may or may not be hot, but the wall treatments in this game are sexy as fuck.
Oh yeah, and the fighting dangerous monsters and questing for justice and fortune in a land ruled by chaos is pretty good too.
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