Opinion: Final Fantasy XV is a Bro Fest and I’m Okay With That

[Caelyn]

FFXV.jpg

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.

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.

[Freya]

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.

[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 .

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!

[Freya]

WE HOPE!

[Hannibal_Khan]

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

[Colonel Angus]

WE HOPE!

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

[Freya]

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

WE HOPE!

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

a bit of both

[Caelyn]

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.

[Freya]

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.

[Lone Wolf Leonhart]

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

[Fynn]

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 .

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!

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

[FFFFsephychibi]

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

[Jessweeee♪]

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.

[Bolivar]

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.

[Freya]

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