I’m sure that bad project management had more to do with any “decline” of Final Fantasy.

Yeah the Wo Long demo surprised the shit out of me with multiple waviness sliders for every section of hair (and like a dozen fucking sections for hair while we’re at it)

Add to that the ability to put any facial hair option on any masc or fem body type, and full slider-based adjustments of every section of the body…

From the linked The Verge article, which I alluded to in my original comment (https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23614043/final-fantasy-xvi-demo-hands-on-ps5)

Loads of people. Millions, tens of millions, probably likely hundreds of millions out of the +/- 3 billion gamers.

When a game comes with a solid character creator, I’ll spend a good 40 minutes to an hour in the character creator at the beginning of my playthrough. I’m probably not the only person like this. Anything that makes character creators better is a good thing and worth caring about.

When a game comes with a solid character creator, I'll spend a good 40 minutes to an hour in the character creator at the beginning of my playthrough. I'm probably not the only person like this. Anything that makes character creators better is a good thing and worth caring about.

If countries like Japan can put work into options for white players, they can do the same for black players.

For better or worse I only played a couple hours of XIII and didn’t get very far into the combat system.

Oh I’m actually aware of all the big reveals in the game as I figured I wouldn’t play it (but then I wound up getting it). I think the meta nature of the narrative is interesting but based on what I know and in the little bits I’ve run into so far - the ghost dudes attacking the slums, Sephiroth showing up to taunt…

But it’s not a US black thing.... black people exist all over the world and black people play video games... Game creators all over the world have all the resources they need as long as they have access to the internet it really isn’t that hard. And with more recent examples like Nioh and Monster Hunter World they…

Japanese RPGs used to just be called “RPGs”.

My cousin and I were just having this discussion about Horizon: Forbidden West. The Black character’s facial features are on point, but the hair choices are just weird. Non-Black folks probably didn’t notice anything off, but it jumped out at us that with the exception of Varl, the Black character’s hairstyles are…

As a curly headed white dude, I stand in solidarity with the quest for textured hair options in gaming.

The party doesn’t have customizable AI and you need to do chip damage to use abilities is because FF7R is a turn based action game.   You aren’t supposed to sit on a single character.  The systems are designed as such that you are supposed to be constantly switching between characters to build up their ATB gauges and…

He say 15 years ago, which means 2008 and the 7th generation of consoles. Which was all around a pretty shitty time for most japanese devs. The was a large amount of general xenophobia or just outright racism towards japanese game not getting with the times and all that. So really this tracks.

Now here come all the white people to tell the Japanese guy why he was “wrong” to feel the way he did.

That’s interesting, because at least in the early 2000s I sensed very little discriminatory intent when people used the term in English discourse —though admittedly, I hung out mostly on console forums. Maybe things were different on the PC side where JRPGs weren’t the norm.

I find the shift to being a straight-up action game really unappealing, combined with yet another video game scowly-faced guy protagonist just makes me totally unlikely to pick this up, ever.

My answer on what the soul is? Experimentation. For better and for worse. FFII had the no-EXP system, III had the job system. IV had ATB. VI through VIII played with setting, and VIII itself had the GFs. X went back to turn-based, and XI tried online. XII moved its battles into walkabout and meddled with customizable…

In other words, Miyamto thinks all of us need to go touch grass more.