I'd like to be able to play a kid character

[Riepah]

For anyone who says Lalafell look like children... no. The proportions are terribly, terribly off. If any child looked like a Lalafell it would hardly be considered healthy.

[HakuroDK]

Been saying they should do this for a long time, but it will never happen because of all the alcohol and sexual references. There are a lot of underage characters in offline Final Fantasies though. I'd actually challenge someone to name more than 5 FF protagonists that were known to be older than 21.

Not possible with main protagonists, but if you mean potential party members that join as protagonists, starting with FFII, we have (at the very least, missing a few due to not beating one or two core games) Minwu, Josef, Ricard Highwind, Tellah, Yang, Cid Pollendina, Fusoya, Galuf Halm Baldesion, Edgar Figaro, Sabin Figaro, Cloud Strife, Barrett Wallace, Vincent Valentine, Adelbert Steiner, Freya Crescent, Amarant Coral, Beatrix, Wakka, Lulu, Kimahri, Auron, Lightning, Sazh, and Fang.

As for children (as the original topic's point. Same as above, some may be missing due to lack of knowledge), we have Rydia, Palom, Porom, and Eiko Carol.

[RiceisNice]

Making children become playable characters leads to a whole set of complicated scenarios, especially in the current state of the game. It's a very delicate scenario to have references or alcohol or sex in the context of children, especially the concept of them getting hurt or dying. Something like a scripted story or cutscene can control that to some degree (such as most of it occurring off screen), but not the case for content that already exists.

[myahele]

Would love to play as a padjal, but the the haloween event atleast made my dreams come true.

But yeah, as others said we can't play children for various censoring purposes. The closest thing is a child-like race ala padjal, but they already said no.

[Senliten]

inb4 loli miqo'tes

I just call them Elins.... ohwait.... XD

[Gralna]

Also there is the whole issue if child violence and death, if added to game. While yes our characters never stay "dead", there is still a visual representation of it. Even Bethesda couldn't get around this with an M rated game, kids in Skyrim were unkillable because FCC wouldn't allow them to release a game in the US where you could cause the death of children.

[kyuven]

All of the problems mentioned, with the addition of severe problems modeling armor. Japan's pretty liberal in what kids are and aren't allowed to wear usually, but the U.S. isn't (take a look at tera online and Bravely Default's censorship issues to see what I mean) so they would have to redesign and retexture every single bit of armor in the game for these characters. In addition, the story would have to be altered since our character's are never "too young" for anything yet certain side characters are seen as being too young. And then there's handling the way the models are interacted with in cutscenes. There are already a lot of heights in the game, but the gap between Miqo'te and lalafell isn't covered. they'd have to design them.
In the end, three possibilities would be more feasible and cause fewer problems than child characters:
1) An event where our current characters are reverted to children for a bit. It'd be a funny thing for the Japanese "Children's Day" holiday event.
2) A new race that is between the miqo'te and lalafell in height.
3) Padjal playable race.

[Shioban]

THIS WOULD BE AN EXTREMELY SUITABLE AND TASTEFUL ADDITION TO THE GAME.
I CANNOT OVER HYPE IT ENOUGH.

OR BE MORE BLATANTLY SARCASTIC.

I mean, based on almost all of my gearsets, id' be genuinely worried if this even became an option.

One could argue that lalafell's look a bit like toddlers, but the differences in body/facial structure at this point just makes me go "Oh look a midget".

[AldoVonAlexandros]

u just want Padjal to be released

[WinterSolstice]

...no. I'd rather avoid all of the bullshit that would be associated with playable child-like characters.

Padjals aren't an option either. They are far too rare from a lore standpoint to be a playable character.