Well I was gonna make a comment about ages and whether or not some of this talk of FF's pattern of sexualization and sexism (specifically regarding character design) really holds up, but I want to have some sure-fire numbers so I'm going to spreadsheet this mothersmurfer. Might take a while.

Some early interesting numbers from FFII-FFIV:

Out of 20 playable male characters, there are five old men, and two little boys.
Out of 8 playable female characters, there's one old woman, and one little girl.

13/20 of the males are young, handsome men.
6/8 of the females are young, pretty girls.
The percentages are actually not far off. I think the problem there is that there's a disproportionate male-to-female number of playable characters. If there were more female characters would there be more old, ugly women?

More important, perhaps, is the comparison of the actual designs. Only three out of the twenty male characters show any significant amount of skin at all. FF2's Firion and big dumb Gus, and FF4's Yang. Only one of those three could really be considered "sexualized" at all, and that's Firion.

On the other hand, of the females, only the little girl, Porom(FF4), the old woman, Unei(FF3), and the runaway, Refia(FF3), do not show significant amounts of skin including cleavage.

That's 5/8 vs. 3/20. That's significant, I think.

It's important to point out that none of this really shows up so much in these early games given their pixelated in-game designs. Thus, these aren't exactly examples of sexism-reinforcing images, but it has other implications, and I'll get into that more later when I get the other games tabulated and finish the stats.