April 15, 2019

Does Square-Enix Hate Women? -- ACT II


I don’t know what’s worse -- the fact that this is the second time I’ve thought to write this post, or the fact that (thanks to Final Fantasy 7, of all things) I feel like I understand the Squeenix collective’s method to their madness.  

Send help regardless.

All right, in order to write this post, I’m going to have to be pretty freakin’ cavalier with spoilers on multiple Final Fantasy games, and several Kingdom Hearts games as well -- including KHIII.  Then again, all of those games but one are at least a few years old by now, sooooooooooooooooooooo…you’ll live.  Probably.  


I think Squeenix is getting worse at writing.

That’s a hot take right off the bat, I know -- almost as pointlessly incendiary and clickbait-worthy as that title.  But in the wake of Kingdom Hearts III, that might be a stance I’ll stand behind for a while.  If you told me that -- despite the realities of game development -- it had been made in full a week before release day, I would believe you wholeheartedly.  It feels rushed, feels hollow, feels confused, feels unsatisfying; the more I think about the game, the angrier I get.

What hurts most is that -- because I’m a closeted dumbass -- I had faith in the game to turn things around for the company.  It could have, and should have proved that Tetsuya Nomura, his crew, et al could still make a story worthy of the prestige.  It didn’t.  I should have known better, because there’s been a consistent decline in quality year over year.  And you know what’s been a consistent part of that decline?  One female character after another gets the short end of the stick, from game to game to game to game.  It’s so common that you’d think they’ve got a grudge against the fairer sex.

So let’s start off with the golden girl, Kairi.


I mean, remember in KHI with all the buildup around the core trio of Sora, Kairi, and Riku?  Granted it didn’t last forever, because Kairi ended up getting lost in the islands’ destruction and subsequently spent 90% of the game in a pseudo-coma, but okay.  It’s an anime-tinged take on a Disney movie, where a dashing hero has to save the princess from an evil witch or whatever.  I’m not excusing it because it’s still sketchy even now, but it could have been way worse -- plus the rivalry between Sora and Riku did its best to make up the difference.

Then you get to KHII, and Kairi’s been waiting on the islands for a year in the hopes that Sora and Riku will come back.  They don’t.  And then she gets kidnapped, only to try and escape, only to get kidnapped harder.  That’s…not great.  This is despite the pre-release implication that she was going to have a more proactive role.  Be a fighter!  Help Sora out!  “This time, I’ll fight, too.”  Remember that?  Remember how it turned out?  She got handed a Keyblade from nowhere to use for, like, one scene against a few goobers from a trash mob.


That was back in 2006, which left our core heroine 0 for 2.  And then after that, she just kind of dropped off the face of the earth.  Subsequent KH games filled in the gap with various new short-haired girls -- two of which might as well be palette swaps of Kairi.  So you get Namine, who’s a “witch” that Sora has to rescue from the bad guys, as well as from a life of tragedy.  And there’s Xion, who’s a *checks notes* flawed replica of an offshoot of Sora, whose mere existence is a tragedy, and inevitably meets a tragic end because the bad guys created her for…tragedy upon others, or whatever.

Notice how many times I used “tragedy”.  Remember it for later.

The luckiest among the KH girls is Aqua, but that’s not saying much.  To wit: she has to rush across the multiverse to stop her idiot friends from ruining everything, and instantly turn against her when she calls them out on their stupidity.  Eventually she saves them from problems they kinda-sorta created, and her reward is to spend a decade plus in what might as well be Hell -- whereupon she nearly goes insane from the loneliness, stress, and grief.  


And then when she finally gets out in KHIII (following a decidedly-limp boss fight that squanders the potential of a truly corrupted “Dark Aqua”), she proceeds to get bodied against enemies she’s already beaten before, and thus rendered helpless until a deus ex machina can bail her out.  

What a gal, right?

(I mean, she’s still the best of the ladies by default -- not counting the mobile/web games, because I ain’t about that -- so nobody’s taking that away from her.)

But I held onto hope.  I held onto hope since 2006, because even if Kairi didn’t get to do much in KHII, more would come.  Even if Namine, Xion, and Aqua are all varying levels of victims, Kairi would get her chance.  Dream Drop Distance even promised as much, with Yen Sid confirming Kairi as a de facto member of Team Keyblade to be prepared for battle.  And KHIII went a step further by putting her in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber so that she can gain the experience that Sora and Riku cultivated over multiple adventures into a fraction of the time.  Finally, she could be a full-fledged character!  Finally, she’d be --


What.

The fuck.

Is wrong.

With Squeenix?

It really says a lot about this sequence when (as of writing) I first went through it more than two months ago, and I’m still mad about it.  Taken solely in the vacuum of KHIII, the question here is simple: what was the point of Kairi, then?  From where I’m sitting, it looks like she was only there to ex machina Sora from an entirely preventable death.  In that context, sure, she’s not entirely useless.  Same for her being important in an emotional sense.

That would be enough if not for two factors.  First off, literally the entire point of the game was to have the final battle in the parking lot pitting the 7 guardians against the 13 seekers.  Kairi was a participant not just to pad out the numbers, but presumably to have her use her newfound strength to tip the battle in the light’s favor.  The fact that she got sidelined in her one onscreen fight (not even with any cutscene flair, partly because she gets kidnapped again) speaks to a categorical betrayal of her role in the game.


Second?  How the fuck do you kick the can down the road with a character for 13 years, only to toss that can into the garbage when it’s finally time to honor your promise?  This is Kairi, a member of the main trio since the very beginning.  She wasn’t the most active participant in what can generously be called the plot, but every subsequent outing presented a chance for her to grow up.  For the devs to redeem themselves in terms of the narrative.  But they didn’t.  Hell, Kairi being able to wield a Keyblade was an accident, a bit of random chance and nothing more.  As it stands, Nomura and crew failed Kairi, and even the tease for future KH games is keen to pretend she doesn’t exist.  So I guess she matters even less than before.

But you know what?  I get it.  

I get it.  I actually, really do.  Everything makes sense if you assume that Squeenix is following a specific formula when it comes to creating their stories -- a formula destined to carry over when Nomura is repeatedly attached to project after project (though he’s not the only guilty party, let’s get that right).  Is it a good formula?  Hell no.  Quite the opposite.  But it’s still their formula, and it’ll see use until enough people scream at them to stop.  So here it is:

Woman + Suffering = Tragedy = Quality

And we have Aeris to thank for it -- because Squeenix has been trying to jam that lightning into every bottle, mug, thermos, canteen, wine glass, keg, and sippy cup it can find.


On some deep, dark level, it’s hard to fault Squeenix for their pursuit of praise.  Aeris’ death is one of the most infamous and iconic in the genre, if not gaming history.  Or if not that, then it’s at least a popular example.  A go-to.  Imagine the gut punch it must have been back in 1997, what with a party member effectively erased from the game -- and the characters actually acknowledge it, both in the brief funeral that follows and the grief they admit to when they’ve exhausted most of their leads.  Cloud, Tifa, Barret, and all the rest were hurt by it, so the player’s hurt by proxy.  A bitter memory, but one with staying power nonetheless.

But here’s what separates FF7 from the modern Squeenix chaff: Aeris was actually a character first.  Was it always part of “the plan” for her to get killed?  No doubt.  As they said once upon a time, death comes suddenly and there is no notion of good or bad.  Fine.  But they made her death have weight by making her life have weight.  She had a personality, and a role, and relationships, and actions, and reactions, and actual screen time.  Even with her poor lot in life, she wasn’t built from the ground up as a tragedy magnet; Aeris was a person first and a victim second.  How many modern Squeenix “heroines” can you say that about?



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I swear, it seems like if a female character isn’t being used to push melodrama or be a generic love interest that motivates the hero, they don’t get anything.  The only exception that immediately comes to mind is Lightning, and she’s terrible for a whole host of reasons (like dooming time and existence itself just because she wanted to see her sister again).  Probably Ashe and Fran from FF12 get off easy, but press F to pay respects to Penelo, who could be replaced with a hat rack without much fuss.

But for real though, have you tried counting all the let down ladies in the past decade or so?  Vanilla 13 had Serah, who spends nearly the entirety of her debut game as a statue -- and to a lesser extent there were Fang and Vanille, who had to sacrifice themselves to ex machina their way to victory (they got a whole game to develop their characters, but this is FF13 we’re talking about and thus there’s only one gold star to share amongst the entire cast).


Then in 13-2 you get Yeul, who -- baffling interpretation of protecting “the sanctity of the timeline” aside -- was literally born to die again and again, with all the emotional weight of dropping a damp dishrag on the floor.  Also Serah’s back, but dies because whatever, lol.  Time to rehash the Sora/Riku dynamic, only 800 times worse than before.  

Then in Type-0 there’s Rem, who despite being deathly ill has to fight in a war, only to be completely empty-headed and unable to respond to anything…and then gets specifically chosen by the gods to die because shut up.  Then you get to 15, and Noctis’ relationship with Lunafreya is…abbreviated, from what I can gather.  But it’s fine, because she ends up getting killed anyway.

Also, there’s The 3rd Birthday.  Let’s…just leave it at that.  So instead, let’s just remember Dirge of Cerberus!  Boy, was that one not great, irrespective of its treatment of female characters!


I don’t get it.

I don’t get how you can consistently botch and hamstring stories across years, projects, development cycles, and console generations.  It’s easy to lay the blame at the feet of a choice few -- Tetsuya Nomura, Hajime Tabata, Motomu Toriyama -- but they didn’t make those games alone.  They didn’t write those stories alone.  And the fact that there was no one on each game’s respective team to edit, curate, or otherwise curb the worst instincts of any given writer or director speaks to a fundamental, potentially company-wide misunderstanding of storytelling.

They have to know that they’re bad.  Or if not that, then I pray that at some point, they’ll hire people to hogtie the big names.  It’s the only way they’ll learn not to botch their myriad stories.


The only justification I can come up with for their failures -- if you want to call it that -- is that for one reason or another, female characters just aren’t a high priority.  Kairi wasn’t.  Lunafreya wasn’t.  Serah wasn’t.  Rem wasn’t.  And so on, and so forth -- because apparently, it doesn’t matter anymore.  They got us (and will continue to get us) with promises of what we want, good female characters well among them.  But these days, the probability that they’ll provide wanes ever more.  Why bother trying if people are going to gobble up whatever you throw out?

But to get back to the original question: Does Square-Enix hate women?  The answer is no…consciously.  But between their refusal to evolve and their incompetence in storytelling, they say a lot more subconsciously.  KHI Kairi wasn’t the best; that much is true enough.  But she never got any better over the course of nearly 20 years.  Why?  Because of negligence.  Negligence that bloomed into ignorance.  It’s one thing to write a bad character; when you continue to write a bad character, making mistakes old and new, then it stops being ignorant and just becomes straight-up hateful.

And if they’re going to stay hateful?  I can only pray that they get out of the game.  Soon.


There.  Now let’s see how they ruin Tifa in the FF7 remake.

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