Thursday 23 May 2024

Is Final Fantasy Sexist?

 Yes. 

In a gaming landscape where AAA games take years to create and cost outrageous sums of money to produce, where selling the maximum amount of units is the goal just to keep a big game company solvent, choices and been made in recent years that have magnified the glaring problem within Final Fantasy.

Women are only important if they are serving the men in the story. Serving their development and giving their lives, their souls, to help the protagonists to achieve their goals. (See Lunafreya, Jill and Aerith.) Alternatively women serve as titillation, feminine ideals or are just there to ideally flirt with the player to make him feel good. This applies to the rest of the FFXV women, Cindy, Aranea and Iris follow the above points respectively. Tifa is now positioned as the homemaker, mother figure with giant boobies and a heart of gold. Also recall the Jessie rewrite in Remake.

Women in Final Fantasy in this era do not stand alone on their own merits, with their own stories. They are only as important as the male protagonists need them to be and will wait patiently in the sidelines pining until they are noticed (Jill).

As stated, I believe this is due to the developers making the conscious choice to appeal to the player, the consumer, the maximum amount of people buying the video games. The majority of the developers and consumers skew male. The developers are appealing to male sensibilities whether it's giving Lightning jiggle physics or excising a character that ultimately challenges the protagonist rather than enabling his quest (Stella from Versus XIII).

It's not about telling the best story or giving every character their own arc. Not anymore. It's about appealing to men and how they feel about women and ultimately, it's about selling video games. That is why Final Fantasy, in this era, is sexist.

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