It's time (Option to Hide other players Glamour)

[Packetdancer]

I..what...huh? Someone gave you plenty of listing, and heck story events have been outlandish. Also, Silly elements has been part of Final Fantasy History! Are we playing the same game? 0_0

To be fair to Zabuza, he said "mandatory". And I don't think there's any point in the MSQ where you're forced to fight alongside an NPC dressed like that; all the instances I can think of off the top of my head are in optional content:

• The 'Tall Fuath' who appears during one of the pixie Beast Tribe quests (as well as during one of the side-quest chains).
• Various potential members of the NPC squadron, as listed before.
• Adkiragh, who is one of the Custom Delivery NPCs.

If you don't unlock Adkiragh and ignore him while doing deliveries to Zhloe—or just don't do custom deliveries at all—you don't ever have to see him. If you don't bother ranking up reputation with the pixies and skip all the side-quest chains in Il Mheg, you don't have to deal with Tall Fuath. And if you decline to recruit the more oddly-dressed squadron members—or grit your teeth until you've leveled them to the point that you can change their outfits—you don't have to deal with them.

So, I'd say it's wholly fair to say that none of those NPCs are mandatory; you can choose to skip all those bits of content.

However, when people try to say that sort of stuff is unthematic, I will absolutely point to those as examples of ridiculous outfits in gameplay. And whether or not I personally dislike seeing a giant snowman in the middle of a serious cutscene—and despite my personal position against this feature, I don't wholly care for that experience either—I think that trying to argue that it breaks immersion specifically because it violates the theme is stretching things a bit; SquareEnix themselves do introduce the same exact ridiculous-outfit element to canon content.

Whether or not you think it's appropriate in a specific circumstance, people wearing such things is unquestionably thematic.

Edit: Holy potatoes, I took maybe 10 minutes to write this post up between doing other things and you all added two new pages to the thread in that time. And I thought *I* was talky. I'm kind of impressed. I may just surrender to the inevitable velocity this thread achieves and give up on trying to follow it—or at least on writing replies that aren't separated from what they're replying to by an excessive number of posts—as we draw closer and closer to the text equivalent of the speed of light...