I stumbled across this gif today:

This, folks, is badass. Wonder Woman (Diana) is depicted doing stuff like this all the time, too (especially in the cartoons) and is one of DC’s heavy hitters alongside Superman, Batman, and Green Lantern (and she’s cooler than Superman and Green Lantern by half, too). And yet, very little love coming her way. We should totally change that, obviously, and I submit that, while movies would be cool, I think she’d absolutely rock in a video game.

By now, the Gods of War/Arkham Asylum format of third-person adventure game is pretty well known. Diana, as luck has it, fits into this format wonderfully and would make a really cool character to use. Why?

The Rope

Wonder Woman’s lasso is a really cool, stylish weapon to be wielded in a video game. You could use it to grab enemies and items from afar, swing from ledges, trip people up, interrogate bad guys, etc, etc.. It’s basically made for a video game format.

The Bracelets

Everybody loves deflecting bullets with their lightsabers, so why not do the same thing with her bracelets–built in defense, cool effects (ricochet bullets into other targets! Re-direct the boss battle’s big attack at the crucial glowing thing!), and so on!

Flight!

Wonder Woman can fly! So go flying! Nobody has done this particularly well in a game yet (to my knowledge, anyway) and she’s a great place to start.

Gadgets!

While not as gadget-intense as Bruce Wayne, Diana has used a wide variety of alternate weapons, armor, shields, jets, pegasus wings, and so-on to fight evil. Why not put it in the game?

…Sounds pretty stock. How do you make it different?

Okay, so here’s my pitch. Keep in mind I don’t make video games and therefore the prospect of this ever coming to pass is negligible, but still.

Seriously, she is one of the coolest characters in the DCU, full stop.

Wonder Woman is similarly invulnerable to attack as Superman (perhaps not quite as durable, but near enough). The challenge of a video game starring a character this powerful is how to make the game difficult. Let’s face it, it’s kinda stupid if WW gets tackled by a bunch of no-name thugs, even if they do have tasers or whatever. Batman it works – he’s ultimately mortal – but you can’t do that with WW or Supes because, well, it just doesn’t make sense.

The solution is as follows: Wonder Woman is effectively immune to regular, run-of-the-mill damage (it has a slow, aggregate effect, sure, but negligible), but killing the bad guys is not the goal of the game. The goal of the game is to save people. Fighting, if done poorly, takes time. Getting shot knocks you out of the air. But the bad guys are currently in the process of blowing up buildings and you, Wonder Woman, need to get there in time to disarm or destroy the bomb. The game would involve mission-based challenges that essentially worked on a time limit. The challenge isn’t being killed by thugs, it’s figuring out a way to get past them or through them fast enough to make it where you need to be in time. Tack on top of that a couple giant monster battles or enemy immortals (Ares comes to mind), puzzles that you need to solve (can you remove the rubble in the right order to prevent the collapse of the roof onto the injured thearter goers? While being attacked by zombies?), an upgradable combat tree, new lasso abilities, new suits of armor, and so on, and BAM – very cool game.

It would also open up a slightly different style of gameplay from just killing the bad guys. I think the Arkham games did this very well, and a Wonder Woman game done in this vein might also work pretty well, too.