I appreciate Square Enix supporting LGBT rights in FFXIV.

[Shiro--Tsubasa]

Wait.... people actually think Gaia and Ryne are a couple? They seem like best buds to me.

They kinda had to make it a little ambiguous since there are many places in the world that would flat out ban the game for putting a blatant lgbt couple in the game. That is why the coding for Ryne and Gaia is that they are a couple, but we won't see an actual confession of love or them kissing (kissing is also an animation nightmare) so that they can be rationalized as "just friends" to those places. There are also gay characters sprinkled around the world of Hydealyn as well, but since they are random npcs with small snippets of dialogue they could change it for those countries that are more intolerant.
Think of it as kind of like a similar situation as LoK a while ago. There was coding of the two girls developing romantic feelings for one another, but we didn't really see anything concrete until the very end and even then they were just holding hands before going on a vacation together with the background colors being one of the many lgbt color patterns. The reason why they were so vague was because the show was airing in places that are anti-lgbt so they were under pressure to not make it so obvious.

It can be frustrating that the dev team have to dance around these places, but the alternative is worse. If the game is banned, think about the lgbt people that could resonate with the characters within those areas. They will lose that. When living in a society that hates you just for existing, having characters like Ryne and Gaia can help a lot even if they aren't obvious as many would like them to be.

[Kolsykol]

They kinda had to make it a little ambiguous since there are many places in the world that would flat out ban the game for putting a blatant lgbt couple in the game. That is why the coding for Ryne and Gaia is that they are a couple, but we won't see an actual confession of love or them kissing (kissing is also an animation nightmare) so that they can be rationalized as "just friends" to those places. There are also gay characters sprinkled around the world of Hydealyn as well, but since they are random npcs with small snippets of dialogue they could change it for those countries that are more intolerant.
Think of it as kind of like a similar situation as LoK a while ago. There was coding of the two girls developing romantic feelings for one another, but we didn't really see anything concrete until the very end and even then they were just holding hands before going on a vacation together with the background colors being one of the many lgbt color patterns. The reason why they were so vague was because the show was airing in places that are anti-lgbt so they were under pressure to not make it so obvious.

It can be frustrating that the dev team have to dance around these places, but the alternative is worse. If the game is banned, think about the lgbt people that could resonate with the characters within those areas. They will lose that. When living in a society that hates you just for existing, having characters like Ryne and Gaia can help a lot even if they aren't obvious as many would like them to be.

I really don't think this is it, FFXIV isn't popular at all in China and that's the big market that is very homophobic.
And they'd just censor it in the localization.

It is true that this happens, particularly with big games in these countries like League of Legends ( Riot is also owned by a Chinese company ).
The game has also done a lot of censorship in recent memory to fit the Chinese strict rating boards.
But the Japanese don't tend to do this it's quite rare, and when it's done it's the localization teams that do it for that specific region.
For example Mai in KoF wears a weird pyjamas underneath what she normally wears that looks totally out of place in the Chinese and Middle Eastern version, and also in the mobile game the art used for marketing in the stores it's censored because the mobile companies are extremely backwards and puritanical ( I've seen games get straight up banned for three pixels of cleavage.. ).
But in-game it's uncensored unless the region requires it.

There's some cases where it'd be too hard to do it too where it's done, for example in the Freddie Mercury movie they *HEAVILY* downplayed his sexuality to make it easy to censor for these regions.
If the movie had accurately portrayed his sexuality the whole movie would essentially have gotten banned.

[Skiros]

They kinda had to make it a little ambiguous since there are many places in the world that would flat out ban the game for putting a blatant lgbt couple in the game.

And why would we cater to what they demand?