Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy XV, Square Enix

No, Final Fantasy XV Was Not Tailored For Women

Published Mon, 20 Feb 2017 08:45:09 -0600

It's just a love letter to bromances everywhere.

Heidi Kemps of Glixel recently attempted to defend the all-male casting of Final Fantasy XV as being "tailored for women" because of the Japanese subculture of Fujoshi, a depreciting term used for female fans of anime, manga, and games who just want to sit around and think about how gay for each other the male characters of said entrainment are for one another. And while the epic bromance of FFXV's protagonists is utterly without compare, I'd argue that taking a game franchise from being centered around romance or revenge and making it about friendship is more a reflection of the audience's collective desire to see friendships as more important than romantic relationships. JRPGs have long held that friendships are incredibly important, and its not like any of the 87 Final Fantasy titles differ in that respect.

While female fans speculating about male characters homosexual love lives may have a somewhat derogatory term in Japanese, its not a uniquely Japanese phenomenon. However it does often center around Japanese forms of entertainment like JRPGs, anime, and manga series. And yes, specifically targeting these fans is something that several companies have reaped the benefits of. The swimming anime Free! and the figure-skating drama Yuri!!!!! On Ice are merchandizing juggernauts. Capcom's Sengoku Basara and NitroPlus's mobile game Touken Ranbu also benefit from that same demographic.

While Kemps does make a good argument for the popularity of Final Fantasy XV despite the numerous complaints made in the western media for not having a main playable female character, I think it's an attempt to fit FFXV into a genre it does not fit. It could have been fujoshi bait, it absolutely could have. But the thing about creating something specifically to target one very specific demographic is that it's hard to make that subtle. And its equally hard to make it such a major success. Yes, fujoshi had already started with their Yaoi fanfiction in several languages before the game even launched, but you can find those fans in every game, and in every form of entertainment. After all, a significant portion of the people watching CW's hit show Supernatural do so because of their fondness for imagining the show's male leads in a variety of gay relationships. And that show did not start catering to those fans until season 5, at the earliest.

More telling than the presence of fujoshi fans, many of whom love the Final Fantasy series because of the sheer breath of male characters they can ship, is the absolute lack of female characters of substance in the properties that are most heavily supported by fujoshi fans. Because fujoshi fans aren't ones who hate women, they're female fans who are given no likeable or relatable female characters and so they react by creating relationships between the male characters. Because when you want a romance, you don't want it between the fully fleshed out male lead and a 2D female prop. That's not a romance, that's the sort of fantasy only misogynists appreciate.

And because female otaku are the strongest consumers in the Japanese market, each of the properties that has cashed in on the fujoshi market is doing nothing to help but create a system where women are marginalized on screen, on the page, and in the game. And we know that the lack of nuanced representation is harmful. So sure, this might just be a capitalist scheme, or maybe its just that the whims of capitalism and those of the anti-women majority have finally found a way to take our money while proceeding to write us out of our own entertainment.

I think western female fans of FFXV find it so hard to enjoy a game that writes all of its female characters off as useless eye-candy, or worse, and so we've tried to find reasons to defend our own enjoyment. Because good feminist women shouldn't enjoy a game that's so ham-handledly anti-women that it's own director said back in 2015 that "an all-male party feels almost more approachable for players." Of the three main female characters that Noctis and his friends deal with, one is your "love interest" Lunafreya who does a fantastic job of supporting Noct's rather useless self despite never really seeing him in person. And she dies before we even get to learn anything about her other than the fact that she is Noctis's fiancee. She literally exists just to provide motivation to Noctis. And then she dies, to heighten that motivation. She is used as something for her finacee and brother to fight over, at one point. It's literally the number one complaint women have about entertainment, particularly in games. Then there's Cindy, who repairs your car while wearing a trucker hat, bikini, and the remains of what was once a jacket. She's there mostly to lean sexily against Noctis's car and put her boobs in his face. Gentiana isn't even a full character, she's just a spiritual servant. Iris Amicita and Aranea Highwind are hardly better in any respect. This is a problem that has long existed in the Final Fantasy franchise, much as I may love it. And it's been one that has bothered me endlessly, because there is no defending it.

And that's ignoring the fact that bromance heavy fiction has been popular in many mediums for a long time. The Hangover series is ultimately all about male friendships, Waynes World was an earlier purveyor of the bromance. But really, it traces itself all the way back to Aristotle and probably earlier. We've celebrated close friendships between men for about as long as we've had recognizable entertainment. Final Fantasy XV having pretty boy male leads who are all friends isn't new. Thats just about every Final Fantasy ever. And there are 87 of them. The only difference with FFXV is that we'd thought we were past the trope of "no one wants to play a game with girls in it."

If Square Enix and Hajime Tabata really wanted to make a game that was designed for women, they could have. If Final Fantasy XV is really an attempt to cash in on the fujoshi market, it's nothing more than a way to suppress women while pretending to care about our interests.

You can check out Kemps' article on Glixel here.

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