Gender locked race?

[Shippuu]

I disagree on the grounds that I think the body type difference goes a long way in that department tbh. Personally I would have preferred a more alien spin on Lunarians for tall and slim race as opposed to another animal thing, but if it's going to be Viera the ears add a further vertical impression with height. The narrow shoulders and long legs only emphasize further. Elezen have very different facial structure and body structure (best I can describe it is as lanky, whereas viera look like they'll be narrow) and Miqote are teeny tiny. One of the female miqo'te faces does look really similar to Viera from the previews I agree, but the body types remain dramatically different. Also without mods it's kind of tough to hide the extra ears and all, bunny suit ears look like they are fake imo.

I don't want to assume this is a common knowledge thing so if you already know this sorry! But basically one of the big things in design (among other stuff) is forming distinct silhouettes. Basically if you black out the entire figure and just look at the outline, can you tell what character it is. I think Viera do still manage that because the body type is distinct, even if again I'd have preferred something other than animals again.

Again, all your arguments still can be applied to the opposite of your claims. You just made excuses for why it's okay despite the tons of overlap the female viera we are getting has with existing races, while stating that a completely unknown and theoretically lion like race has too much overlap and couldn't possibly be unique enough from Roegadyn?

It's funny you talk about distinct silhouettes when ffxiv is pretty poor in that regard, especially with female characters. There is very little difference in the silhouette between female miqote and female au ra for example. And the same can be said for female elezen and female viera, the only major difference being more narrow shoulders on viera and bunny ears instead of elf ears. So by your argument, a male lion race need only distinctly different ears and be a more narrow shouldered version of roegadyn.

You're applying a double standard here.

There is a chance this changed though. I mean, he took the creator of Tactics and FF12 into the team. And if Matsuno-san is really the creator of Viera, then he also has the opportunity to create the Male Viera.

People keep bringing up Matsuno being involved as a positive thing for male viera to be included but seem to forget he's the one that purposely made male viera pretty much non existent in the first place. He may actually share Yoshida's old opinion and not want male viera to be shown or playable either. He certainly didn't have any in the game's he made.

[Jaywalker]

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Naw, I gave a full argument where I was willing to say that there are things I think could be better but there's other stuff I think works. It sounds like you're possibly going into this with the assumption that my claim is that everything is ideal and perfect, which isn't the case for me. I am making the argument that while there are things I'd do differently if I was Square Enix god (which I'm sure is the case for everyone haha), I basically have certain elements I consider higher or lower priorities in evaluating their designs.

For example, I think we have enough humans + animal features. I thought we had enough when it was Miqo'te, and it was definitely enough when we had Au Ra. With Viera I kind of figured it was an inevitable choice because they're popular and people wanted them, but like I said if it was up to me I'd have tried to keep things closer to how Roegadyn, Elezen, Highlanders, and frankly even Lalafells played with facial structure, proportions, and various feature shapes. Sans animal bits.

If however there are going to be more animal bits regardless of my feelings there, I'm not going to throw up my hands and go THEY SUCK GDI WHY MORE ANIMAL PEOPLE. What I'm going to do is look at the various body types and tones we've seen so far and examine whether they do something distinct within that. Which they do. So while it might not be my perfect dream come true, I'd much rather have a tall skinny rabbit people race than say, waifish female lunarians at roughly 5'0 tall. Different elements at different priority levels.