I'm over 50 years old. I remember when I was playing HOMM2 in my twenties. You'd think I'd understand this, but I don't. I don't really get the attraction of action-grrls, or women acting like men. I can accept the idea of the wammen Heroes in the HOMM series, but I'm not quite sure what people are looking for in their wammen Heroes to make them likeable. Mostly I guess we just want them to be attractive, I suppose, since we'll be looking at their portrait image a lot. If they're not attractive, maybe they can at least meet a fantasy archetype, like the old hag in the swamp, or a severe and scary type like Maleficent from the original Sleeping Beauty movie. Or, at the very least, give us a Xena warrior princess, which is kinda sorta an archetype by now, I suppose. Although it's exactly the kind of archetype that I'm saying doesn't really work for me. On the other hand, I thought Xena was a better show than Hercules. Maybe because the idea of a Warrior Princess who's really a barbarian tough guy was so ridiculous that nobody involved with Xena ever took it too seriously. I don't remember Herc ever having a go-go dancer scene.
Anyway, Adelaide is a strange case. She's one of the most attractive women in the line-up. It's in fact one of the best original portraits, and I gave serious consideration to not updating it at all. However, I decided that I wanted to update every portrait, and would only make exceptions if the alternatives were clearly worse than the original. And in doing so, I only found two that qualified in the entire line-up; Crag Hack was not really replicated according to his original (great) design, and Corkes has few options, and the one that he has isn't as good as the original. In Adelaide's case, as much as I like the original, the ensrick option is just as good, and has a high degree of fidelity to the original as well. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's look at the full line-up. The others that weren't selected were either too different, and just looked like generic fantasy girls, or they were poorer implementations of the original concept. The ensrick one is the only one that equals the original.
And I don't think it beats it. It just equals it. But because I'm picking so many ensrick and other similar AI generated images in general, it fits better with my collection than the original. But it was a close call. I really almost just left it alone and didn't even change it.
WINNER: ensrick, once again. But I'm posting the original next to it too, just because the call was so close in this case.
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