Why is Final Fantasy XV sexist?
So, Final Fantasy XV is sexist. I’m not here to make that argument, it’s made already here and here and in many other places.
I’m not here to argue whether it’s a good game anyway, I think it probably is…
I’m here to give my best guess as to why the developers at Square Enix would choose to make the game this way.
It turns out that it’s really hard to not fall into making the argument about whether and how the game is sexist! I have had to restart this section two times after realizing that I was listing out the things that either the movie or the game did that were sexist. Let’s see if I can avoid that this time and go right to analysis. Why is the playable cast of the game entirely male. One of the game directors described it this way:
“Speaking honestly, an all-male party feels almost more approachable for players. Even the presence of one female in the group will change their behavior, so that they’ll act differently. So to give the most natural feeling, to make them feel sincere and honest, having them all the same gender made sense in that way.”
This was my first big hint as to why the designers made the choices they did. The title screen of the game also reads “A Final Fantasy for fans and first-timers.” So they were trying to make the game more approachable for ‘players’. By players I don’t think they mean the large numbers of casual gamers that have a relatively equal gender distribution. I think the “first-timers” they are trying to make the game more approachable to are the “core gamers” that play the big AAA action titles every year. I believe that the new target audience that FFXV is trying to appeal to is the bro-gamer CoD/Battlefield crowd.
But why would you do that? Why would you want to make a franchise that has for more than two decades been about subtle and touching relationships across genders and races and classes, that has revolved around a slow thoughtful strategic combat system and deep compelling stories attractive to gamers who enjoy fast paced, action oriented games that while nodding to single player stories focus on providing a headlong rush of action?
I think the answer is pretty simple. Money. The casual games market is dominated by free to play games. A few games do make a lot of money there, but the market is hugely crowded and producing games in that market is a difficult proposition. Square-Enix has shown that they can have success there with both FF-Exvius and FF-Moebius. Both games show that the developers know what a Final Fantasy game for that market looks like. If you want to make money on a console title, those are not the gamers that you want to make the game approachable to. Those gamers may micro-transact for a few dollars, but most will not shell out $80 for a game. I don’t have the numbers, but Square-Enix does. They have been releasing FF games for mobile for a couple of years now and know what price points they can count on getting, how many downloads, and how much free titles will monetize for.
No, if you want to make a financially successful AAA console title you need to appeal to the gamers that most regularly shell out that kind of money for annualized action titles. So how do you do that?
Well, you change the combat system. You can keep it complex and nuanced, but you have to make it action oriented. So FFXV did that. ‘Sure’ you say, ‘but so did FF XIII: Lightning Returns and it didn’t become a hot misogynistic mess.’
I actually think that fact supports my thinking in this. FF XIII-3 did add action combat, and I think that was an attempt to attract the bro-gamer. Action combat and an attractive playable female character has wooed them before with games like Bayonetta. (Just google ‘bayonetta lightning’ to see that I am not the first person to make that connection) I suspect that the sales results were not as strong as Square-Enix would have liked.
So the subject matter and setting needed to be made more ‘approachable’ to the new target audience. How do you do that? Well you make the playable characters bros. You take away some of a female NPC’s clothes. You lean on the tropes that make boys feel like heroes, give them an action movie with a cool girl that you kill to make them, like the protagonists, care about the conflict. Give them a princess that they will get to rescue (whether she needs it or or not).
So, I think that’s how you end up with a Final Fantacy that is sexist. The bright spot in this is that the game had two designers, and while one gave the quote above, the other expressed discomfort with games that didn’t have diverse playable characters. Also that title screen does say ‘For Final Fantasy fans and first-timers’ so they don’t want to lose their core audience. So far I have been happy enough with the actual dialogue and characters in the game. The playable bro quartet is predictably… well what you would expect a set of late teen boys to be like if they were basically good guys wrapped in a problematic culture. So I have hopes that through the course of the game, its DLC and maybe even sequels, they will develop into men that can have a woman in their midst without ceasing to be ‘sincere and honest’. In short I hope they will grow up, and maybe help the bros that the game was designed to be approachable for to grow up as well. Who knows, maybe that was even the purpose of the developers… Hey, I can have a Fantasy too!
