Basic Trope: Player character's gender has little to no effect on gameplay.
- Straight: In Tales of Troperia, you can make your Player Character either male or female and regardless of choice, the story and gameplay will be unaffected.
- Exaggerated:
- If you choose a female PC, she will still be met by female love interests despite being written as straight, will slouch in her chair despite being stereotypically lady-like, and will even be referred to as "He" because the programmers seemingly did not think anyone would use the female PC.
- If you choose a male PC, he will still be met by male love interests despite being written as straight, will sit with folded legs despite being stereotypically manly, and will even be referred to as "She" because the programmers seemingly did not think anyone would use the male PC.
- Downplayed: The male and female PCs have cutscenes and animations altered to fit their gender and personality, and have slightly different stat growths and class paths but still function the same.
- Justified:
- Tales of Troperia is a Nintendo Hard game where you fight literal demons from hell and other Eldritch Abominations that'll One-Hit Kill you anyway, so your gender doesn't matter in the end.
- The PC is a Troperian, a species that inverts Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism and has minimal differences between male and female bodies.
- The PC is rather androgynous regardless of your choice, meaning their expressions wouldn't have to be changed quite as much between genders. They're also canonically bisexual, explaining why people of more than one gender flock to them.
- Trope Quest, the main Show Within a Game, needs someone brash and masculine to play the role of The Dragonslayer. Since they're not picky about the gender of The Dragonslayer's actor, there's nothing stopping that role from being played by a Lad-ette.
- You're too young for gender to really matter.
- Inverted: The male PC and female PC look completely identical from the player's perspective and their gender is never referenced in-game, but will lead to very different games, class sets, and even endings.
- Subverted: Your character's gender alters your initial stats, which means that gender does matter in the end...
- Double Subverted: ...But you can change these to whatever you want later in character creation, regardless of gender, meaning that it doesn't.
- Parodied: The only difference aside from appearance is a very wide array of useless minutiae like toiletry preferences, underwear options, and embarrassing secret kinks. None of these even change any dialog or acknowledgement, let alone gameplay but the game insists that they are of supreme importance. The game insists that they add major replay value and as a reason to play through a whole game as both genders.
- Zig-Zagged: The PC's gender is purely aesthetic in Chapter 1. But then they get gender-specific reactions and dialogue in Chapter 2. It goes back to being ignored in Chapter 3...
- Averted:
- The natural aesthetic differences between men and women are reflected in each PC's animation, design, character reactions, etc.
- The PC can only be nonbinary.
- Enforced:
- The game developers did not have enough time to flesh out mechanical and aesthetic differences between the characters.
- The game developers don't think gender is matter for gameplay, so they avoid making roles and stories tie with character's gender.
- Lampshaded:
- Invoked: Drake the Mad and his army kidnap every man and woman they see, since both are equally valuable slave fighters.
- Exploited: Charlie uses the PC's inexplicable gender-defying charm that often comes with this trope to help his sibling Raynenote come to terms with their bisexuality.
- Defied: T'Aka Zulu decides to only train the men in his kingdom for combat, with the preservation of traditional gender roles being his only motivation.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: 'I understand not making the female PC weak. I don't understand not bothering to give her a different voice actor."
- Deconstructed: Tales of Troperia suffers sales-wise because women who play it feel alienated by a player character who is basically a man in a woman's body.
- Reconstructed:
- A set of Personality options allow the PC to behave in a more "masculine" or "feminine" manner regardless of their chosen gender. There's also an Orientation option that decides which NPCs flirt with them.
- Tales of Troperia doesn't receive successful sale in the mainstream market due to many players feel alienated from the character of their chosen gender, however, this game becomes a Cult Classic amongst Butch Lesbian and Camp Gay fanbase who play ''Tales of Troperia'' for representation of them, so in the next release of the game, the developers decide to openly represent same-sex relationship in the main storyline, which increases the total sale of the whole franchises.
- Played for Laughs: Classes are available to all genders even though many of them are identical except for a gender tag and incongruous and self-contradictory combinations are Purposely Overpowered.
- Played for Drama: The Player Character was originally Crux, a Starfish Alien trying to elude the intergalactic Void's Gate cult by disguising themselves as a human on Earth. Naturally, because humanity's genders are still a rather alien concept to them, their animations don't quite match the Player Character's chosen gender.
Back to Purely Aesthetic Gender. Male, female, doesn't really matter to be honest. You're just a troper, and that's all that matters.
