There are many games with female leads, starting with point & click adventures
Syberia 1-4, Lucy Dreaming, The Longest Journey series, some Kyrandia, Kings Quest games, Chinatown Detective Agency, Born Punk, A Vampyre Story, Anna's Quest, Cognition, Kathy Rain, Inside Jennifer, Milkmaid of the Milky Way, Phantasmagoria, Shardlight, Still Life, The Medium, Gray Matter, Tsioque, Sally Face ...

And there's of course Jump & Runs like Sunblaze, Shantae, Alwa's Awakening, Games like A Plague Tale, Forgotton Anne, Gris, Grim Legends, Nancy Drew, Return of the Obra Dinn, ...
Heck, even Mrs. Pacman is a game with a female lead.


But I think the question in this thread is specifically about games that can be considered to be RPGs or at least have strong RPG elements (where I don't see hit / miss chances as a necessity, hitpoints and damage are just as good, it's just a different combat system, but still based on stats).


Maybe Elvira should be mentioned, but right now I don't know if it has player stats. It has a combat system however.
Maybe Stasis fits the description as well?

Jade Empire is an interesting one: while you chose your character gender and there is no canon that I know of, it seems almost all marketing material for this game features the female options. So much that before playing it I thought it was a game with a fixed female protagonist (and I ended up playing the one that is represented in most marketing material).

King's Bounty: Armored Princess - Much of the King's Bounty series has exlusively male protagonists, this goes in the opposite extreme, being exclusively female.

This.
I wanted to say exactly the same.

I don't think this is particularly accurate.

There is a point where I felt that both JRPGs and WRPGs took a bad turn, and I think it's actually around the same time for both subgenres: Final Fantasy 7 for JRPGs, and Baldur's Gate for WRPGs. In particular, I'll play games like Ultima, Wizardry, and Might & Magic just as easily as I'll play games like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy. (Note: Not all the games in these series are to my liking; I don't like Ultima 7, for example.) Of course, the issue is *different*; JRPGs became too cutscene heavy and too linear around that time (FF6 and Chrono Trigger both have non-linear endgames, which FF7 lack), while WRPGs went all-in on real time with pause combat, which I find to be the worst of both worlds, with the drawbacks of both turn-based combat and action combat, complete with the issue where things can "run away" (even with auto-pause enabled).

Other counter-examples exist. For example, Eschalon Book 1 doesn't let you make a female character. Even worse, it looks like there's a gender option, but if you try to change it, you get some BS about "the story being for a male character".

(If it were the other way around, with the game forcing a female character, then the game would qualify for this topic.)

Examples of male lead games that otherwise follow the restrictions I set forth:
* Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 (there's apparently a novelization of the series that makes the main character male)
* Planescape: Torment (Nameless One is male; personally I think that sort of story would have suited a genderless protagonist better)
* Eschalon Book 1
* Lords of Xulima (you can create the rest of your party, but the main character is fixed and male)
* arguably, Morrowind could qualify since there's apparently a line in Dragonborn that references the Nerevarine as male, but apparently someone involved says the reference was a mistake.

The main character of Dungeon Siege 1 was later depicted as a female by the name of Lady Montbarron in Dungeon Siege 3.

That's a good exception to the rule and answer to the OP that I didn't think of, thanks!

And I forgot about PS:T and VTM: Redemption as examples for rare WRPGs with a single male protagonist. The Witcher and Gothic are obvious ones, of course, but the latter probably too focused on action and player skill for the OP already, and as to the first, I don't quite remember how much the success was based on stats (can you even change them?) and how much on player reaction.

OK I understand she isn't the main character, but Lady Katarina in "The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing" was incredibly funny AND useful. I had played the game when it was in 3 episodes, and in all of them Katarina was higher-leveled than Van Helsing, for the largest part of each episode (and thus, stronger than him), until she was reaching her lvl-cap (which was lower that Van Helsing's), so he could overtake her by the end of the game.

I haven't played (and most possibly won't) X-Blades and Blades of Time, but they too feature canonically a female character, however I don't think they can be counted as RPGs.

Fair enough, I don't know you and have no idea what grand scheme of interests you have, and maybe "JRPG weeb" is off mark, but you sure like these discussions, unfortunately at the cost of others.

Regardless of opinions on RTWP, I think enemies retreating is a legitimate factor to keep account of. Not everything in a game can or should be murdered mercilessly.

There are plenty of WRPGs with a fixed player character. They're a minority, but unfortunately very few seem interested in having female protagonists. Some games even allow you to customize your character but not your gender.

Well most gameplay focuses on combat. And physical combat is not a female strength. And people tend to make what they know. If there were more women interested in making games there would probably be more female protagonists. But most women have interests other than coding engines & making games. I know my sisters certainly do. It's primarily just a small % of men that want to bother with that. And a lot of them seem to live in Japan :)

I'm not talking about enemies retreating here. I'm talking about a situation were the battle goes out of control if the player doesn't press the pause button fast enough.

(With that said, in games where combat does not take place on a separate screen, enemies running away is incredibly annoying, as is party members running away out of the player's control (fear effects or morale failures, for example); it's particularly annoying if, for example, the last remaining enemy is running away, you want to save the game, but the game doesn't let you because the game still thinks you're in combat. I note that Wizardry 8 suffers from the issue of enemies running away (but at least afraid party members don't make the party run away, as would happen in Wizardry 7).)

There are certainly women who are interested in making games, and in fact there are many women who do, in fact, make games. (Remember Roberta Williams, who appeared in a GOG interview about the Colossal Cave remake?)

Also, don't forget that much combat in fantasy RPGs is magical, not physical. Not to mention the fact that games don't need to model reality, and in fact, often shouldn't. (I did read recently about a strange happening in Dwarf Fortress that's caused by the game simulating things you wouldn't expect it to coupled with a bug.)

I didn't see anyone mention Assassin's Creed Odyssey, where the company and sequel confirmed the female character was the canon choice.

KotOR 2 was mentioned and is a good one. I believe it's a rare case where the "evil" ending was canon as well, though I could be misremembering.

Hero of the Kingdom: The Lost Tales 2.

It's barely an RPG though: very much straddles the line between RPG, "point and click adventure game", an a small element of hidden picture.

Yeah, I said most women not all women. Most men don't sew dresses but some do.

Though Roberta Williams was a writer for point and click games her husband developed. But Ken developed them. I'm sure she was an asset in creating the fiction & storytelling in them though & helped run their business. But you're going back pretty far to come up with a recognizable name.

I think Natsuko Ishikawa would be a better name. She's a great writer who works on FF14. But there too, she's a writer not a developer.

A few of the games Roberta wrote stories for/designed did have a female lead & the games she was involved in really were not combat focused at all. So, yeah if there were more women like her there would probably be more female leads and less combat in gaming. But there are just not a lot of women doing that.

I agree. But it's still combat. And combat is just not that feminine.