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.”

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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.

OKAY GUYS: THIS IS A GUEST ARTICLE POST. Don't be jerk butts. If you disagree with her opinion be civil as it is an opinion piece. Any debate about "gamergate" that she brought up, take it to EoEO. This is for opinions on the all male playable characters outside of just the news piece.

Can i be a buttjerk though?

I don't have a problem with a game choosing to specifically focus on a group of guys. I just hope it doesn't get too bro because that's actually pretty boring :p.

Is this guest author going to stick around?!

I also hope one of the party members turns out to be homosexual. You have the perfect game for something like that now, SE!

WE HOPE!

We have no choice in the matter. We can hate them or love them, but this is only FFXV were gonna get. The game looks beautiful, but in my opinion the lack of diversity in the party will hurt the story. There may be a serious love interest in this game(all good stories need one) but i doubt it will draw ppl into the story the way Aerith or Garnet did. #TooManyDicks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Wl_uQOABxg

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Originally Posted by Freya

WE HOPE!

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You hope one of the characters is gay or that she sticks around?

Yeah, with the news about Luna being different than stella and them previously saying stella would be a strong female, i'm not too terribly worried about the lack of female representation

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Originally Posted by Colonel Angus

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Originally Posted by Freya

WE HOPE!

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You hope one of the characters is gay or that she sticks around?

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a bit of both :shobon:

Hello, Eyes on FF folk! The lovely Freya came across my blog, we got chatting about the piece and I said that I'd be happy for it to be reproduced here. I'm going to hang around for a bit, answer any questions you guys have and see if I think there's anything I could write specifically for the community here.

Check out our contributor subforum if you'd like to learn more!

I am kinda looking forward to a brofesty honestly. My favorite part of mass effect was the friendship with garrus. If we have a similar friendship type thing represented but with a whole group, okay with that.

Better to have a story full of guys and have it fit the narrative than shoehorn a female in there for the sake of having a female, then having people complain "uuhhh she doesn't really fit".

I'm cool with the bro fest :up:

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Originally Posted by Mirage

Can i be a buttjerk though?

I don't have a problem with a game choosing to specifically focus on a group of guys. I just hope it doesn't get too bro because that's actually pretty boring :p.

Is this guest author going to stick around?!

I also hope one of the party members turns out to be homosexual. You have the perfect game for something like that now, SE!

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You're making me ship Gladio and Prompto so hard, Mirage! :exdee:

Cool, I'm down with caelyn's opinion. Glad someone feels the same way :) Good points.

I won't know until I see how it's done. Bro-Fest doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing, I feel pretty much the same as Mirage on the subject. If they're all super bro just having a bro time well I feel like we'll have a lame trip. Undoubtedly I'll buy it on day one even if it looks hopeless because when it comes to Final Fantasy I have a serious problem.

I don't take moral issue with the cast, although I think there's an argument to be made there, it's more along the lines of when Final Fantasy XII stripped away many series conventions and just did not feel like a main entry. It was a great game, as XV likely will be, but there's a point where reinventing the series erodes the significance of the name. I just enjoy video games with diverse casts and I prefer my favorite series to accommodate that.

Also, Gamergate wasn't about censorship. Gamergate was about a Kotaku journalist providing game coverage in exchange for sex. I read the disclaimer but it lacks integrity to have an outsider take pot shots to sensationalize a guest article, then only allow actual members to call them out on it in a separate venue, where it can't be seen next to the actual article.

I put it there more because the EoEO thread Misogyny in Gaming was recently closed as it got too heated and some were rude. The topic does get heated and the FF subforum isn't the place for that heat, EoEO would be but last time it caused itself to get closed. While she mentions it, the point of the article wasn't that. It was how it's okay to have an all male cast. Omitting that part completely would, I think, dilute the opinion of our guest author. I don't think it'd be fair to invite someone over to post it and then heavily edit and omit things just because we get heated here. So I advised people to talk about the opinion itself and to take that part to a serious discussion area. Not to not discuss it, just not here.

That's all.

Although that's just my editor disclaimer as I brought her in. Feel free to actually discuss it, just try not to get super heated about it. Be respectful to our guest is all I ask :D

To be fair, this piece probably wouldn't have existed if Gamergate hadn't happened. I've been writing a lot about inclusiveness in game over the past couple of weeks, because it's been a big topic. I felt that the news that the latest Final Fantasy, a generally diverse franchise with some excellent female leads and supporting characters, was going to centre around an all-male party was particularly interesting when the timing was considered.

One of the popular ideas pushed in recent weeks is that critique somehow equals censorship. It's a pretty ridiculous notion; if it were even vaguely true, we wouldn't have any entertainment media left by now. Another one is the idea that people are calling for some kind of mandatory diversity check list. Again, it's utterly untrue.

I was surprised when I read about FFXV's cast, and also disappointed. I can't say that I wouldn't prefer a more diverse party. However, I wasn't bothered by it on a pro-diversity level. When I realised that, I had to spend some time thinking about why that was the case and I felt that writing it down was worthwhile. I feel that there has been a lot of negativity over the past few weeks and I tend towards negativity in my own writing sometimes, so I wrote something with a more positive spin.

I'm not disappointed. I'm actually surprised this hasn't happened sooner/ in the span of over 20 years of a bunch of people coming together to save the world, not one of those times it was done by a group solely composed of males, there was always a decent man to woman ratio?

Not always. 3 females out of what, 16 in total isn't a decent ratio :p

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Originally Posted by Mirage

Not always. 3 females out of what, 16 in total isn't a decent ratio :p

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Who's the three? I dont mind FFXV not having black dudes tho, w/ sazh they proved they don't write well for black characters. Although we should not be surprised by this, Japan has almost zero black ppl and they don't want that to change(their immigration policies would imply as much).

Terra Relm Celes.

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Originally Posted by Hannibal_Khan

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Originally Posted by Mirage

Not always. 3 females out of what, 16 in total isn't a decent ratio :p

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Who's the three? I dont mind FFXV not having black dudes tho, w/ sazh they proved they don't write well for black characters. Although we should not be surprised by this, Japan has almost zero black ppl and they don't want that to change(their immigration policies would imply as much).

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They don't have many white people over there either, but JRPGs always seem to have them.

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Originally Posted by Depression Moon

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Originally Posted by Hannibal_Khan

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Originally Posted by Mirage

Not always. 3 females out of what, 16 in total isn't a decent ratio :p

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Who's the three? I dont mind FFXV not having black dudes tho, w/ sazh they proved they don't write well for black characters. Although we should not be surprised by this, Japan has almost zero black ppl and they don't want that to change(their immigration policies would imply as much).

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They don't have many white people over there either, but JRPGs always seem to have them.

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More like they white wash the majority of Asians in their RPGs and anime.

Always wondered about that.

For the most part, I'm not really bothered by it and I feel the blow up has more to do with the Gamergate issue that has caused an interesting and long needed discussion on the topic of female characters in media.

I still view this as a writer though, and if the story calls for an all male cast then I see no real problem with it as gender really shouldn't matter in a well written piece that works towards a purpose. I would be more annoyed if the creator's forced a female into the dynamic for the sake of marketing when the story didn't call for one. I've always hated the "Token" character that often creeps up in modern media.

This game was not originally intended to be a numbered entry, so the designers did a lot of things you normally wouldn't see in a mainline FF, but since we all kind of know this, I don't see the point in berating the game for it. This was never meant to be the calculated, focus-group approved, easy to digest FF vanilla we've all come accustomed to, and for better or for worse the game will shake up the series because of that distinction. Let's just relax and enjoy the ride. :cool: Well until some of us find out we hate it, then we can start the lynching... I er mean bitching. :shifty:

Can someone give me a breakdown of what gamergate is? preferably 5 sentences or less. I tried to read an article earlier but i think i got side tracked and i dont remember what the scandal is..

Hrm. I would definitely be exponentially more interested in XV if it had playable female characters, because I've always enjoyed playing as them more and that's my personal preference and always will be. So as far as it being an all-male cast goes, I think it's unfortunate but it's not damning. As mentioned earlier, if they actually take a few steps forward and write a decent romantic plot between some of them, I think that would be really cool.

What I am much more turned off by is the oversimplification the game seems to be getting in that you can only directly control one character. What is this, Persona 3? (And even then they fixed that nonsense in the PSP reboot.)

Hey guys, don't forget, Final Fantasy X-2 was YuRiPa. The fact that it was a sequel game doesn't really take away from it, imho. Still a female-centered game!

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Originally Posted by ~*~Celes~*~

Hey guys, don't forget, Final Fantasy X-2 was YuRiPa. The fact that it was a sequel game doesn't really take away from it, imho. Still a female-centered game!

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I keep telling people that!

We had an all-female party, so why not an all-male one if it fits the artistic vision? And keep in mind it's PARTY, not CAST that is all male. As others have pointed out, there's at least three visible females in this game and they all seem to be (at least hinted to be) important, interesting characters.

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Originally Posted by ToriJ

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Originally Posted by Depression Moon

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Originally Posted by Hannibal_Khan

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Originally Posted by Mirage

Not always. 3 females out of what, 16 in total isn't a decent ratio :p

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Who's the three? I dont mind FFXV not having black dudes tho, w/ sazh they proved they don't write well for black characters. Although we should not be surprised by this, Japan has almost zero black ppl and they don't want that to change(their immigration policies would imply as much).

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They don't have many white people over there either, but JRPGs always seem to have them.

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More like they white wash the majority of Asians in their RPGs and anime.

Always wondered about that.

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Yea especially with female characters. Stella looks damn near swedish. We shouldn't be surprised by that either, Alot of women thoughout Asia are increasingly getting plastic surgery to get more caucasion features. The XV male characters still look japanese to me tho. Who wants to bet XV development team is 90%+ male lol

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Originally Posted by ~*~Celes~*~

Hey guys, don't forget, Final Fantasy X-2 was YuRiPa. The fact that it was a sequel game doesn't really take away from it, imho. Still a female-centered game!

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But it does take away a bit from it. Sequels, prequels and spin-offs and such very often have a different focus and so traditions in first installments and such often do not appear in them.

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Originally Posted by Hannibal_Khan

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Originally Posted by ToriJ

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Originally Posted by Depression Moon

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Originally Posted by Hannibal_Khan

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Originally Posted by Mirage

Not always. 3 females out of what, 16 in total isn't a decent ratio :p

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Who's the three? I dont mind FFXV not having black dudes tho, w/ sazh they proved they don't write well for black characters. Although we should not be surprised by this, Japan has almost zero black ppl and they don't want that to change(their immigration policies would imply as much).

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They don't have many white people over there either, but JRPGs always seem to have them.

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More like they white wash the majority of Asians in their RPGs and anime.

Always wondered about that.

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Yea especially with female characters. Stella looks damn near swedish. We shouldn't be surprised by that either, Alot of women thoughout Asia are increasingly getting plastic surgery to get more caucasion features. The XV male characters still look japanese to me tho. Who wants to bet XV development team is 90%+ male lol

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It certainly happens, but I don't think it's a big enough percentage to be called "a lot".

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Originally Posted by ToriJ

More like they white wash the majority of Asians in their RPGs and anime.

Always wondered about that.

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It's not just RPGs and anime, it's throughout a lot of Asian pop-culture and media. Most Chinese/Japanese/Korean tend to see fairer skin as a lot more attractive than darker skin.

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Originally Posted by Rostum

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Originally Posted by ToriJ

More like they white wash the majority of Asians in their RPGs and anime.

Always wondered about that.

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It's not just RPGs and anime, it's throughout a lot of Asian pop-culture and media. Most Chinese/Japanese/Korean tend to see fairer skin as a lot more attractive than darker skin.

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They even went as far as turning Aladdin white & giving him a Dutch name like Vaan.

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Originally Posted by Hannibal_Khan

Can someone give me a breakdown of what gamergate is? preferably 5 sentences or less. I tried to read an article earlier but i think i got side tracked and i dont remember what the scandal is..

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The "scandal" of Gamergate arose when it came out that a Kotaku journalist had a sexual relationship with a developer he provided coverage for. Some youtube personalities used this as an opportunity to discuss journalism ethics and the close relationship between the media and developers/publishers. Unfortunately, a few bad eggs harassed the crap out of the female dev involved. Kotakuand Polygon lumped this in with the contemporaneous harassment of Anita Sarkeesian (which drove her from her home) as representative of the "#Gamergate" crowd as a whole. Leigh Alexander went one step further and said gamers as a whole are socially-inept misogynists and it's been a giant internet civil war ever since.

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Originally Posted by Rostum

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Originally Posted by ToriJ

More like they white wash the majority of Asians in their RPGs and anime.

Always wondered about that.

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It's not just RPGs and anime, it's throughout a lot of Asian pop-culture and media. Most Chinese/Japanese/Korean tend to see fairer skin as a lot more attractive than darker skin.

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I wasn't sure how far it went so I just named the things I knew for sure.

When I was in Tokyo, I saw a significant number of females walking around with parasols in the streets to avoid getting anything that could resemble a tan. So yeah.

In many ways this is kind of a dumb time to be doing an all-male game. Frankly, women in games are woefully under-represented and in the last couple of years studios have finally started getting called out on it quite significantly. And I'm definitely one of the people doing the calling, you look around especially at 'AAA' games and there are just too many straight white dudes hogging the limelight.

...However.

Final Fantasy XV gets away with it here - at least in principle. Usually, one of the defences against putting more women in is "creators shouldn't have to stifle their creativity by putting more women in," which is an argument that falls down because they're not excluding women because of their 'creativity,' they're excluding them because they just don't consider them. Many of us are guilty of this, even me - I'm a straight white dude, so that's what my characters default to in a work of fiction. It does take some conscious effort to change your own prejudices. But in this case the defence I mentioned kinda stands up. Tabata has specifically said this is a story focussing on a theme of brotherhood which is a perfectly valid theme to tackle. That's a genuinely OK story related reason that might mean you leave out female characters.

We want more women in games not only because we want to better represent a large and growing player base, but because we want more variety and diversity in our games. Focussing on a theme like brotherhood which is very rarely explored is a different way of giving us variety and diversity. The other thing to remember is FF usually has loads of women in it - the last three console games have all had a female lead. Say what you like about the quality of those leads, the fact is they were there and flying the proverbial flag. So this is a series that generally does have its priorities right - that is inclusive and progressive. If the next three games are all just full of dudes, then we have a problem. But just for a one off? I don't think there's really much reason to criticise them.

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Originally Posted by Mirage

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Originally Posted by Hannibal_Khan

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Originally Posted by ToriJ

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Originally Posted by Depression Moon

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Originally Posted by Hannibal_Khan

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Originally Posted by Mirage

Not always. 3 females out of what, 16 in total isn't a decent ratio :p

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Who's the three? I dont mind FFXV not having black dudes tho, w/ sazh they proved they don't write well for black characters. Although we should not be surprised by this, Japan has almost zero black ppl and they don't want that to change(their immigration policies would imply as much).

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They don't have many white people over there either, but JRPGs always seem to have them.

---

More like they white wash the majority of Asians in their RPGs and anime.

Always wondered about that.

---

Yea especially with female characters. Stella looks damn near swedish. We shouldn't be surprised by that either, Alot of women thoughout Asia are increasingly getting plastic surgery to get more caucasion features. The XV male characters still look japanese to me tho. Who wants to bet XV development team is 90%+ male lol

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It certainly happens, but I don't think it's a big enough percentage to be called "a lot".

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Maybe not as much in japan, but in south korea and china it is "a lot".

It is perhaps worth noting that from FFX onwards, the ratio of male to female playable characters has been in favour of females when you consider all direct sequels.

FFX: 4-3 (male lead)
FFX-2: 0-3 (female lead)
FFXII: 4-3 (technically male lead, but really depends on whether you feel Vaan, Balthier or Ashe are the protagonist)
FFXIII: 3-3 (female lead)
FFXIII-2: 1-1 (female lead)
LR:FFXIII: 0-1 (female lead)

Result: 12-14 in favour of females, with mostly female leads and two games where only females were playable (notably in LR, the only character who enters your party from the previous games at any point is Fang, another female).

If this were on the back of male-dominated games such as VI, VII or IX then I could probably understand a revolt for the 5 males 0 females playable in this game, but we're not in that situation.

^ haha that's a lot of ladies in FF!!!

I was just watching a video analysis of ff15 and the dude narrating it was commenting about how he doesn't like that it's an all male cast and there needs to be a playable female because "the game needs a hott character"

I cant understand wanting a playable female, to just have the option, and some diversity, but to flat out want a female playable character just to have eye candy and watch her boobs bounce when she attacks isn't really a good reason... She wouldn't be there to add to the plot or the game, just to simply make someone want to wank. And personally I think that's pretty shallow D:

And if you don't consider direct sequels? There is just no way a main FF game (not a sequel) would ever feature an all-female cast and that's part of what people's gripe is about. You can throw out any number of combinations to show that SE has a pretty even distribution of male to female cast (and they do a good job there) but that doesn't change the fact that having an all male cast for a main numbered entry is significant. Sequels have much less hype and give Square much more freedom to experiment and it is not a coincidence that all of the female-heavy games have been sequels.

FFXI and XIV aren't direct sequels and have female leads if you choose to do so ;)

But seriously, I'm for this for FFXV. "Brotherhood". That's something that's not been done before with FF, I'm looking forward to the banter! It will be good to have a party of TRUE friends, rather than people just randomly put together to fulfil their destiny!

And it's not like women aren't being represented in FFXV. We have Stella and Luna who will have major roles within the game. Then there's the black haired girl and possibly other unannounced females. I'm sure they will just as prominant, just not playable.

That's just cheating as there is no"lead" characters in those ones :p

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Originally Posted by Del Murder

And if you don't consider direct sequels? There is just no way a main FF game (not a sequel) would ever feature an all-female cast and that's part of what people's gripe is about. You can throw out any number of combinations to show that SE has a pretty even distribution of male to female cast (and they do a good job there) but that doesn't change the fact that having an all male cast for a main numbered entry is significant. Sequels have much less hype and give Square much more freedom to experiment and it is not a coincidence that all of the female-heavy games have been sequels.

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I disagree that they would never have an all female cast, I can see them doing such a thing. Whether they do or not depends on whether they feel it's right.

I don't think it's an issue that there is an all male cast because I genuinely don't think there is any sexism involved in the decision. If anything, they are being brave to not have females, considering how massive the appeal is for FF fans to have a female playable character.

To my knowledge, this is the first time it's happened for FF and I don't think it should be turned into a Big Deal. It's one thing to say that females should be fairly represented in gaming, it's another thing to say that you can't have an all-male cast in gaming.

Ironically, giving them too much grief over the all male cast could actually prevent an all female class in the future.

"OK, so for XVI we have these 5 party members. We wanted to explore a theme of sisterhood, so they're all women, and they-"
"Woah. Woah. Woah."
"...yes?"
"Remember the **** we got last time for doing that with dudes? No more creative license for you buddy, 50/50 split."
":'("

Fine by me. :p

And yeah, this isn't really a big deal, just something to talk about on the internet. Would you rather we not talk about FFXV? :p

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Originally Posted by Freya

That's just cheating as there is no"lead" characters in those ones :p

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To be fair, Shantotto and now Y'shtola are the representatives of their games whenever the series cross pollinates :grover:

Shantotto is extremely far away from something you would call a lead.

Each main storyline might have something resembling a lead, but shantotto's not that person in any of them.

She's just an npc questgiver with an (very) amusing personality. A long time after the game's launch, she got her own tiny add-on, because of her existing popularity.

Interestingly, when you look at FFXIV, the head of each starting city seems to be a female and the head of the Scions (the "guild" you belong to, for those that don't know XIV well) is a female. There are a few guys here and there in leadership positions (although Ul'dah is headed by a female, the general is a male - and I think Ishgard's religious group will be headed by a male) but they aren't terribly numerous.

Can't remember much of XI's leads.

Isn't hornguy in charge of gridania? Also, the sultana is kind of like in a power struggle with some of the other guys there. I guess she is the official leader, but things are more complicated behind the scenes.

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Originally Posted by Mirage

Isn't hornguy in charge of gridania? Also, the sultana is kind of like in a power struggle with some of the other guys there. I guess she is the official leader, but things are more complicated behind the scenes.

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Ah, I thought horngirl was the leader. Could be wrong though. I'm more thinking of the companies - I mean, when you see the portraits, the girl leaders are in their portraits and the guy leader (Ul'dah) has to share with the midget princess lady with the annoying voice.