Elexis Sinclaire

Elexis Sinclaire is a fictional character in the SiN video game series by Ritual Entertainment and Sin: The Movie, a 60-minute anime OVA produced by ADV Films along with Ritual Entertainment.

Elexis is a rich and powerful mad scientist who is the main antagonist character in the SiN series. She is often perceived as one of the most sexual (either sexiest or most sexualized) female characters in video gaming.

In video games
Beautiful, charismatic and ruthless, Elexis Sinclaire is a leading, genius-level biochemist and genetic engineer, and CEO of the SinTEK Industries, a powerful multibillion dollar empire. Her biological mother abandoned her at an early age; during her upbringing she learnt from her devoted father, Dr. Thrall Sinclaire, and eventually took a position at SiNtek as a geneticist. Rising through the corporate ranks she eventually rose to supreme power after her father's mysterious disappearance. Elexis and SinTEK turned to illicit trades with their own brands of chemicals and drugs. Eventually her research led to the development of U4, SinTEK's most advanced chemical agent with mutagenetic properties. Ultimately, she secretly plans to overrun the world with her mutants and forcibly evolve the mankind, bringing about a new world order.

Elexis returns in SiN Episodes, after "keeping a low profile" in SiN: Wages of Sin. She is featured only in the intro of the one and only episode, as she watches the captured Blade at the beginning of Emergence, before attempting to change him into a mutant (Computer Gaming World criticized the "cringe-inducing scenes [of] villainous sexpot Elexis Sinclaire's digitized boobs practically slapping you in the face").

Character design
In the original game, Elexis had "clothes and makeup that wouldn't appear out of place on a street-walking extra from the film Pretty Woman. Many of the official arts showed her portrayed as carrying handguns and submachine guns, including in one of the game's package cover pictures, but she wields no weapons at any point in the actual game (in the story mode).



For SiN Episodes, after at least one re-design that was eventually rejected, Elexis' new look was revealed. Her character design was closely based on Canadian fetish and adult model Bianca Beauchamp who then served as Elexis' real-life model for publicity and trade show appearances.

Gameplay
Elexis appears in the first game's single-player mode in several cutscenes only, but one of in-game models of her is also available to use in the game's multiplayer mode, even as the players will always see Blade's hands (Maximum PC commented: "We didn't know Elexis Sinclaire (the lusty, busty villain of the story) had such manly mittens!" ). The game also featured a famous Easter egg scene of Elexis pleasuring herself in a jacuzzi, available after using a cheat mode. UGO.com included it on the 2010 list of 25 sexy video game secrets, and also included the game's final cutscene of Elexis escaping by distracting the player's character Colonel John R. Blade "with the concept of her vagina" on the list of 11 weirdest game endings that same year.

In SiN Episodes: Emergence, she only appears during the game's introduction scenes.

In film
In the anime Sin: The Movie, Elexis looks very different, looking like a fantasy sorceress, and her character and backstory were also changed. In the film, her father was taken down by the government for his mad bioexperiments that she continues (she actually keeps her father as a huge mutated monster). She also has a lover named Vincent, whom she also turns into a monster, then vivisects. At the end of the film, she falls from skyrise building, presumably to her death.

According to Animecritic.com, "Elexis is probably the most developed character, and yet even she doesn't possess that much depth."

Promotion and reception


According to Story-Driven Character Design, the "beautiful, sexy" Elexis was the main selling point of the first game. The fetish model Vanessa Upton was hired to promote it in 1998. Later, she was portrayed by Bianca Beauchamp to promote SiN Episodes: Emergence in a photo session and at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in 2005.

Elexis Sinclaire was received mostly very positively. In 2000, she was voted by the readers of GameSpot to be the ninth best female character in the history of PC gaming. In 2006, the Polish edition of GameStar voted her at 15th place in the poll for the title of "Miss of the Video Game World", while GamesRadar featured her in the article about the best breasts in video games, adding: "More than sinful, these magnificent mammillae ought to be illegal." In 2007, she was included on Tom's Hardware among the 50 greatest female characters in video game history ("With the brains of a mad scientist and the body of an underwear model, Elexis is one of a kind.") and "Elexis' curvy physique" in SiN Episodes "easily squeezed her" into fifth place in ActionVault's list of top "video game chicks". In 2008, GameDaily ranked her appearance in SiN Episodes as 21st on the list of top "hottest game babes", while PC Games Hardware included her among the 112 most important female characters in PC games twice, separately for her appearances in the original SiN and in Episodes. In 2010, UGO.com featured her as one of the 50 hottest women games in video games ("Elexis Sinclaire is charming, brilliant, and an absolute fox with nigh-impossible proportions."). In 2011, GameHall gave Elexis a special mention before the countdown of the ten most beautiful and deadly video game villainesses, while Wirtualna Polska featured her among the top ten villainesses in gaming, adding that she looks "pretty well, of course if one likes this type of beauty."

Virgin Media included "the improbably proportioned Elexis" on the list of the ten "game girls you wouldn't dare to date", adding that "it's just a shame the actual games aren’t any better." The book Gendered Bodies and New Technologies found Elexis' character to be fascinating for transforming technology into "Mother Nature." According to Game Design, however, "It's hard not to argue that sex appeal had something to do with the success of Sin's Elexis Sinclaire." There was also some negative reception; according to a 2007 retrospective article by GamesRadar, Elexis looked "like she crawled out of an S&M club," "sexualized to the point of deformity."