Ultimately the whole FF16 race debacle boils down to a stupid irrelevant question being asked, and it got a stupid irrelevant answer by Yoshi-P.

If asking '' are there any black people in your game '' is seriously an important question you want to ask a director of a game, you must be out of your damn mind. I am always craving for more gay characters in video games, but I'd never ask anything of the sort like '' are there gay characters in the game???? '' from any developer. It's such an awkward goddamn question.

But Yoshi-P's answer or rather justification was pretty dumb as well. Many medieval European inspired fantasy worlds are filled to the brim with '' diversity '' and those limitations you put on yourself and the game you are creating are wholly artificial and self-imposed. And ultimately as I've browsed through all the trailers and pictures of FF16, it's not really heavy-handed with the medieval European inspirations to begin with, so the '' race '' thing being one thing they are seemingly holding fast to seems silly. The whole '' while the characters might not be diverse, they have a diversity of ideas and backgrounds and stories!! '' thing also kind of irked me, as if you could only have one or the other! But there's a kernel of truth there as well, sadly it's generally used AGAINST having diverse characters, as if to maintain the current hierarchy and disregard diversity entirely.

Even so, I don't think Yoshi-P has any ill intent though and I think he just built the foundation of FF16 on a generic vision of medieval European inspired fantasy, and generally speaking those worlds do tend to look a certain way in terms of characters and people in them, mostly white, if not all white. I don't believe there was any deliberate decision to exclude anyone, just the dev team following common tropes and that's that. That doesn't make the game '' worse '' either for not including certain type of characters, and to say that would be weird, EXTREMELY weird.