Speaking of soul calibur, Hilde had full armor.

I didn’t make up a rule which is contradicted by any Fantasy MMO I just described the World of Warcraft Transmogrification system. Where you can give the stats of your fancy higher armor/level items to lower level ones but they must be the same armor class (Cloth, leather, mail and plate.) There are also universal enchantments which can be applied to any piece of equipment regardless of what type of material it is made of. This is a system that exists in the Lore as created by the Dev’s so that people could make their character look how they wanted without sacrificing performance.
The point I am trying to make is that Video game logic is flexible according to what the developers want it to be. Yes any good group of story tellers will try to make their universe’s rules as concise as possible. But they achieve this by either getting rid of the inconsistency or creating a extra set of rules or circumstances that made the inconsistency possible.
It is a matter of whether you pay attention to how they explain it. if you don’t know the lore Chain mail bikinis will bug the crap out of you.

yeah but we aren’t dealing with a model we are dealing with whole cloth fake people. Something that never was real and will never be real. When you start to claim abstractions of people have the same impact as the actual person it blurs the line between reality and the absurd.

for example “That kid is drawing a picture of a stick figure with giant C’s for boobs. That stick figure has no personality at all She is just a pair of tits to that little misogynist! Timmy go the to corner and think about all the bad things you did.”

There is a very distinct line between real and fake. You can take a picture of a model and copy it a thousand times. You can trace the picture, it doesn’t change the fact that she is a real person you are objectifying.

A drawing as you said represents the female form, It also represents the elf form. and as much as you try to make it realistic by rendering it giving it ultra realistic skin textures it will never be a real living being. In fact the more realistic you make a fake person the more it creeps real people out It is called the valley of the uncanny. In our gut we know the difference between a real living person and a make believe person. It is the same reason why Call of Duty doesn’t turn people into killers. Scantily clad women in a video game don’t make you see real women as objects for your gratification.
Unless you believe that Video games make people violent?

That’s the problem. It’s a guilt-free way for many people to objectify women, because they are representations of the female form. It’s like saying “this picture of a model isn’t objectifying her because it’s a picture!” which is obviously inherently ridiculous.

See, you made up a rule on the spot which is ALREADY contradicted by any fantasy MMO that you can play. Take World of Warcraft for instance. You can enchant anything you want, be it cloth, metal, leather, whatever.

The point I am trying to make is that even video games and MMOs need to have some sort of internal supporting logic which makes sense inside that universe. Often in cases where these sorts of armors are portrayed, the logic seems to be “LOL BOOBIEZ” rather than anything that really makes sense. Any good storyteller or group of storytellers tries to remove as much inconsistency in their universe as possible, and just because you CAN make a woman wear next to nothing doesn’t mean you SHOULD.