Your comment has thus been rendered invalid, your challenge defeated.

I love GOW because of the gore and the awesome weapons, but I just can't fap to Marcus and Co...Hell, the locusts look more sexy than them (or maybe I'm just into that sh*t, yes..?) by sexual comparison...

That said, I love muscular men, but with bishounen faces~

I don't see a difference between fixation with male body sculpting and male face aesthetics. they both seem pointing towards excessive image fixation.

and don't think body sculpting is manly, to achieve most of the muscles you need to be on a diet (even stricter for 6 packs), do stretching (and embarrassing exercise postures), wear tight clothes, your butt will lift up, your breasts will buff etc.

Trust me, I frequent a gym and seeing buff men looking with admiration at body-builder posters or measuring other gym friends muscles is far from being manly.

Gym doesn't lengthen your d..k, make your voice stronger nor your gestures manlier. It only gives you physical strength, I think that's something to be proud and somewhat biologically manly, and FF character don't falter on that.

But even though Nomura wins, I'll say character designers have gotten lazy.

You can't get good character design by simply using a stereotyping cookie-cutter machine.

Most of the things we tend to "inherently" know about gender are the works of XVII century moral philosophy.

To be honest, I don't really like either visual design. One is absurd to the point the chins look like they're 1.5 the size of the rest of the head, if not larger and they're all gritty and MAAAANLY (it may be story appropriate, but I haven't played EITHER game...) and then the other has a little more variation (One looks like a thief, the other a main hero, one may be a bloody mage, all based on appearances) but they're a little boring and all but one seem to have the exact same features.

Maybe this isn't a good comparison of character choice, but it's pretty clear that the only differentiation between character design in GoW are their heads, even if they are wearing armor because they're in a war. Their heads don't look too different from each other to me. A little palette swap here, more facial hair there, give this guy a head accessory, it's like playing with dress-up dolls.

And while the argument is made that Nomura characters tend to be androgynous looking, at least there is design differentiation. He goes for more casual and contemporary-inspired styles because, as can be seen in the GoW picture, giving everyone the same armor makes the design look plain.

It's really a contest between age, and burliness.

I know.

who knows?

If you want a medium build black guy, play Borderlands. The black guy in it is a professional soldier without all the giant muscles.

Funny enough, the role of the bulky tank guy is played by a giant white guy named Brick. He looks like the biggest bouncer ever.