The Women FFXIV Needs

[Merrigan]

Please re-read the OP to gain further insight as to the current issues in the visual designs of the main cast. My post focuses more on hairstyles and color palettes more than any other aspect of their design.

I have already read it. And for me, the problem is really not only the "colour" of the main cast. It's a concern that actually seems quite secondary to me, in the sense that it can be justified by the lore (and by the cultural tendency, in Japan, to distinguish a main character by his or her hair colour).

If you want to introduce diversity, you might as well go all the way and kill two birds with one stone: change the colour AND go beyond the "wax figure" aspect.

[aveyond-dreams]

I have already read it. And for me, the problem is really not only the "colour" of the main cast. It's a concern that actually seems quite secondary to me, in the sense that it can be justified by the lore (and by the cultural tendency, in Japan, to distinguish a main character by his or her hair colour).

Ok so why are all the women in this game blond and nearly all with short or tied up hair? Fire Emblem 3 Houses is also a japanese game and they do not suffer from these sort of issues with visual design in terms of its women. There is sufficient variety in their cast. Naturally, as I have said before, the majority of players want to play attractive or idealized body types rather than some of the alternative options that have been suggested in this thread. Changing things up on the hair and color side of things would be an excellent starting point, along with a pivot back towards more fantastical and feminine clothes for them.

[MikkoAkure]

Ok so why are all the women in this game blond and nearly all with short or tied up hair? Fire Emblem 3 Houses is also a japanese game and they do not suffer from these sort of issues with visual design in terms of its women. There is sufficient variety in their cast. Naturally, as I have said before, the majority of players want to play attractive or idealized body types rather than some of the alternative options that have been suggested in this thread. Changing things up on the hair and color side of things would be an excellent starting point, along with a pivot back towards more fantastical and feminine clothes for them.

Most of Fire Emblem’s hair colors are still on the lighter side, especially if you remove the blues and purples that don’t exist in real life because Fire Emblem trends more on the anime side than Final Fantasy when it comes to hair colors.

There’s a variety in the cast because there’s always like 50 characters in each game. That doesn’t mean they’re really explored as much beyond a small handful though.

Yoshi-P has already commented on the whole white hair thing as a thing he noticed before and it just happened to be how things ended up. He even considered changing the hair color of some of the Scions for that reason. Urianger and Estinien were never originally meant to be involved with the Scions when they were first written.

But again, most JRPGs tend toward lighter hair colors. This isn’t new.

[aveyond-dreams]

Numerous characters have sported unique hair colors throughout the series. Vanille, Rydia, Lenna, Faris, Terra, Lightning, Serah, Eiko, Maria, Porom, and so on. Given that there are a large amount of characters in the Fire Emblem cast that still are able to retain unique visual characteristics, it is concerning that FFXIV was not able to accomplish this despite having an easier, smaller amount of characters to work with. More care and attention should have been paid to the visual design and changing the hair colors of the scions would have been an adequate solution, especially with the visual changes they underwent at the start of Shadowbringers.

[MikkoAkure]

Numerous characters have sported unique hair colors throughout the series. Vanille, Rydia, Lenna, Faris, Terra, Lightning, Serah, Eiko, Maria, Porom, and so on. Given that there are a large amount of characters in the Fire Emblem cast that still are able to retain unique visual characteristics, it is concerning that FFXIV was not able to accomplish this despite having an easier, smaller amount of characters to work with. More care and attention should have been paid to the visual design and changing the hair colors of the scions would have been an adequate solution, especially with the visual changes they underwent at the start of Shadowbringers.

Not every Final Fantasy has anime hair colors and that slowly died off in a lot of other video games too when it became less important to differentiate sprites from each other. Amano's art for Terra even changed because of sprites being too similar and Lenna had something similar, being white-haired in art and CG and pink in sprites. Terra is blonde in Amano's art, CG, and in Dissidia. But because she looked too close to Celes due to the technology, she was given green hair.

Shibuya and Amano originally designed Terra as having blonde hair, a staple of the Final Fantasy series due to the color's exotic connotations in Japanese culture, however Shibuya instead chose to change her hair to a bright green when finalizing the game's sprites in order to better distinguish Terra from the rest of the cast.

The whole Ivalice series is grounded in realistic hair colors with the vast majority of characters being blonde. FFXV is completely realistic too, minus the notable exception of Ardyn. And that has also carried over into FFXVI from what we can tell of the characters we have seen so far.

FFXIV 1.0's character and art direction was done by Akihiko Yoshida, who also did art and character design for the Ivalice series and NieR: Automata so it's no surprise there's a lot of blonde and light-haired characters and more realistic designs. 1.0 was rooted more into realism and we had more medieval-inspired clothing, which is reflected in the clothing options for levels 1-50 that carried over into ARR. The different races had much more different hair color palettes from each other and the Plainsfolk Lalafell were the only ones afforded blue or green because of their lore. They could have made more of a change, but one of the constraints they had was to be able to bring everyone's 1.0 character mostly untouched into ARR.

While we can certainly afford to have more dark-haired NPCs, light hair is definitely the direction they went with from the beginning as is typical for the character designer. Since all but 2 of the Scions are carry-overs from 1.0, and they gave the newcomers "mystical white hair", it's carried on into the rest of the game since we don't have a cast that revolves as much as say FFXI. But I don't think long or dark hair is the most important thing we need for female characters in this game. You can already make your WoL's hair long or dark and there are plenty of other players with long or dark hair. MMOs I have played don't tend to allow for longer hairstyles for obvious reasons and that's mostly fine. Realistically, anyone who has long hair knows how much of a pain it is when you're moving around a lot anyway.

And as I said, Yoshi-P noticed how the characters coming together all happened to be blonde or have silver hair, but they did not decide to change their character designs since "that would create an entirely different impression". Take that as you will but I don't think they were required to change their characters' hair colors just because they noticed the characters they happened to bring together were similar. I've played pretty much every game Akihiko Yoshida designed so it never takes me out of the game when I don't see a lot of brunettes, it's just a style choice.

If you're going to bring up the topic of variations of female character design in the game, there's much more other things they can do and I don't think that "long and dark hair" is nearly on the same level as your other thread on more western-appealing guys.

[aveyond-dreams]

Cool, they still had differently colored hair at the end of the day when I played those games. Perhaps a revolving cast is something they should consider in order to resolve further issues regarding the characterization of main party members. At this point what we precisely need is an entirely different impression or new characters because 10 more years of the scions isn't going to work out at this rate.

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

Cool, they still had differently colored hair at the end of the day when I played those games. Perhaps a revolving cast is something they should consider in order to resolve further issues regarding the characterization of main party members. At this point what we precisely need is an entirely different impression or new characters because 10 more years of the scions isn't going to work out at this rate.

10 more Years of the Scions will be just fine.
What could/should happen is characters get shuffled to support roles like Krile has numerous times and then make reappearance and rejoin the group when necessary.
And possibly their roles could be filled with new/different characters and Vice Versa.
You can hate on White Hair but these characters are well liked, so keeping them around is a better idea then completely shelving then completely replacing them with new brightly-colored haired characters

[aveyond-dreams]

Adding another scholar to the cast in the form of Krile is the last thing the main party needs, given how oversaturated it is with those types. Forever characters are not a good thing, especially not 20 years worth of them for goodness sake. We cannot continue with a cast that looks and thinks the same like this one does. This will not make for a story that captures hearts the same way that Heavensward did.

The bar of quality has to be set and maintained, right now they can do better than what we're seeing.

[Vatom]

Soon as I saw fang I said yup you got my vote

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

Adding another scholar to the cast in the form of Krile is the last thing the main party needs, given how oversaturated it is with those types. Forever characters are not a good thing, especially not 20 years worth of them for goodness sake. We cannot continue with a cast that looks and thinks the same like this one does. This will not make for a story that captures hearts the same way that Heavensward did.

The bar of quality has to be set and maintained, right now they can do better than what we're seeing.

Who said anything about Scholars? Estinian wasn't a scholar and neither was Yda...erm...Lyse.
Forever characters arnt a bad thing, especially if the characters are well liked. Ill agree with anyone that the fake Deaths are kind of dumb especially if they do it more then once, but I dont find it necessary or a smart move to just get rid of familiar popular characters.
And...Shadowbringers did a pretty good job.