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Opinion: Final Fantasy XV is a Bro Fest and I’m Okay With That
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As we've heard, Final Fantasy XV will have an all-male party. Some people have taken offense to this. Although on my own reflection of this news, that doesn’t seem to bother me. Here, in convenient list form, is why.
It appears to be a deliberate decision made with full awareness of the implications.
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Final Fantasy XV’s main cast is all male, and it was a conscious decision made by both of the game’s directors. Despite this, Director Hajime Tabata admits that “it’s not healthy to have a bias in genders.”
Tabata said, “The party members being all men was something that [former director] Tetsuya Nomura had kept as a very important element of this journey. He wanted to depict a story in which a group of men, a group of friends, journey throughout the world. So that’s something that I kept inVFinal Fantasy XC.”
This is important. Contrary to Gamergate propaganda, there are no evil women who want to censor games. Not me, not Anita Sarkeesian, not Zoe Quinn. We just want developers to think about what they’re doing and not auto-fill their games with generic straight, white male characters. If Tabata and Nomura want to make a male-bonding car adventure, that’s cool with me.
They are not our characters.
My preference for self-created characters isn’t something I’m quiet about. Outside of the MMO offerings, I’ve never felt that any Final Fantasy character was mine. They’re not even existing characters put in your care, like Geralt in The Witcher. You may be able to choose their gear and skills, but you have very little control over their actions. In a typical FF game, you may as well be watching a movie for all the agency you have when it comes to the behaviour of the characters. I’ve said before that I have no problem with well-developed, well-written male characters. I just don’t like grunting bald bloke with no personality, especially in RPGs. I have no expectation of character control in a Final Fantasy game, why should this one be any different?
The playable party is not the whole cast.
Okay, the party is going to be made up of guys. I don’t believe for a second that there won’t be plenty of female NPCs.
I can give Square-Enix the benefit of the doubt.
Final Fantasy games usually have a diverse, generally well-written cast. Previous titles in the series have included female protagonists or entirely female parties. This isn’t Piranha Bytes doing another game in which women are treated like poo or entirely absent. When a developer decides to go with an all-male party after decades of decent representation, I’m happy to give them a pass.
Now, this single piece of news doesn’t really say much about gender in FFXV. It could be horribly misogynist, it could have the greatest female characters of all time. We don’t know. Either way, I’m happy to wait for the game to find out for myself.
