On the historical accuracy of chocobos:

Yeah, but it's a game about wizards and knights riding around on giant chickens so...Sorry, I should explain. IGN, a video games journalism site just posted an--huh? 

Pictured: Noctis, the moody, emo protagonist of Final Fantasy XV
seen here riding a chocobo. Which is basically a big chicken.

I guess we're finally going
to get some full-frontal Ifrit...

Yeah. Yeah, this one's going to be about video games, if you're going to bail, now's the time. Still with me? Super. So they interviewed several members of the Final Fantasy XVI development team about the game and amid a discussion about returning elements from previous games and the similarities between FFXVI and Game of Thrones, the question of representation came up. The recently released trailer for the game featured exactly zero people of color, and everyone's like, what's up with that?

Above: Terra from FFVI.
Your guess is as good as mine.

Final Fantasy games have never been terribly diverse. Early entries had a kind of chibi/anime style that made ascribing a particular racial or cultural identity to characters difficult, and back then I kind of just assumed that most of the characters were either asian or white. But mostly I didn't think about it because I grew up immersed in a pop culture where most characters in fiction looked like me. Later games introduced Barret (in FFVII) and Sazh (in FFXIII) who were definitely Black, so it seemed like the developers were maybe getting the message that the audience for their games was broader than just Japanese and white American suburban boys.

And I don't know, am I just questioning this out of some sense of white liberal guilt? I don't know, maybe? But it is legitimately weird seeing a video game in 2022 going out of its way to feature an exclusively white cast. In fact, when Naoki Yoshida, the game's producer got the question from IGN, he explicitly said that the game's setting is based on medieval Europe and consequently all the characters will be white.

And, one presumes, succumbing to plague.
Better keep those cure potions and Phoenix Downs handy.

Pictured: Yoshida, seen here weilding
a gun-blade from FFVIII. It's a gun
that's also a sword. Because reality.

"Ultimately, we felt that while incorporating ethnic diversity into Valisthea (the game’s setting) was important, an over-incorporation into this single corner of a much larger world could en up causing a violation of those narrative boundaries we originally set for ourselves. The story we are telling is fantasy, yes, but it is also rooted in reality."

-Yoshida on being bound to

rules they just made up

Couple of things. First, as Siri Jiang from Kotaku points out, there were definitely Black and brown people living in Europe between the late fifth and early fifteenth centuries. 

I mean, do a google search Naoki...

As it happens, real-life Arizona is just 
crawling with Gameras. Like, just infested.

Secondly, based on isn't the same thing as attempts to accurately recreate an historical period, something Final Fantasy games have never cared about before. They've vacillated wildly in settings and themes. Some had traditional sword and sorcery, quasi-medieval settings, some were steam punk and some were sci-fi. FFXV was basically about four dude-bros on a road-trip across the American south west and also there are dinosaurs. So the point is what even is he talking about?

I mean, I'm not trying to tell this guy or anyone on the creative team how to design their fictional setting, and I also get that I'm a white American questioning a Japanese company's decision to make a video game with an all-white cast of characters, but I mean, if they set those boundaries for themselves--boundaries that ludicrously exclude people of color from their fantasy world of chicken-riding knights on lore grounds--maybe change the boundaries? 

Goddamnit, even the chocobos in Final Fantasy XVI are white...