Quote Originally Posted by Randy View Post
Character diversity is really not a problem with Final Fantasy. Unless you're just saying they need different races.
In terms of just very different characters, that's kind what they've always typically done anyway. Look at FF7 and FF9. They almost deliberately design the characters to cover all the different bases. Almost unrealistically so. You never find a group of such different people hanging around together like that in reality.
FF15 (and FFX-2) are perhaps the only games where the party is a realistic composition (i.e 3 girls going around together or 4 guys going around together is something that actually happens. You very rarely see a young child hanging out with a teenage girl and an old man ala FF4)
Except with age, FF is pretty bad about large age gaps with only FFIV and VI giving a decent age gap among the cast and even then it still lacks gender and ethnic diversity. In Suikoden you could have a party consisting of an Old Man peddler, a kid playing adventurer, a middle aged beast man, a prominent female knight, teenage warrior, and a dog. That's just from one game. Suikoden is a bit better (though it could still make more strides in this department) about creating a large and diverse cast of playable characters that deal with different, genders, ethnic groups, species and age ranges. The oldest female characters in the FF universe are three 20 year old looking chicks who retain their youth by cryo-crystal sleep making their age more a technicality than something to be awed at. Suikoden has some similar issues with True Rune users but even then it's actually got female characters who are physically and mentally between the 40-70 age range which is kind of unheard of in JRPGs. Barring temporal shenanigans (I'm looking at you XIII Trilogy) and "magic race age" (Hi Fran) the oldest female character in the numbered FF series is Lulu at the ancient age of 22.

I mean Cid Highwind is portrayed as some middle age old man in his fifties but he's actually in his early thirties (32 to be exact); Cecil and Cloud are considered veteran soldiers and only one of them can legally drink in every country and that's barely. Meanwhile, Viktor is a scrapping 24 year old helping out the Liberation army in Suikoden 1, he's 28 by the war's end and 31 by the start of the second game as he now travels as a grizzled mercenary (who is surprisingly less mopey than his younger counterparts ) so we actually really watch characters grow old and change in a more realistic manner over the hyper-sensationalism of your typical anime/JRPG. Honestly, Chrono Cross has more diversity in it's cast of playable characters than the most of the FF series.