It was just one of those kinds of nights that the thought occurred to me that while I've long recognized and resented the bias
Final Fantasy has for featuring old men in playable contexts (all over the SNES games) versus old women (it has never happened)... what's actually the oldest playable women have ever been allowed to be in the main series? The answers may not shock anyone, but they're pretty depressing.
First off, Lightning in
XIII is the oldest protagonist at 21. The very oldest main playable characters are Aerith in
VII and Lulu in
X, at 22. Beyond this, we have to start looking at all kinds of mitigating qualifiers to include anyone else, so in that spirit: Beatrix in
IX is a briefly controllable guest party member at 28; Fran in
XII is ambiguously "old" but only in magical terms to further exoticize and sexualize her; Aranea in
XV is a guest party member but one the player cannot directly control and play as--she is 30. The absolute oldest playable woman outside of the main series is the returning Rosa in
The After Years, at the almost unthinkable 36 years old. That's actually the game with potentially the highest concentration of adult women in its cast, even if exact numbers derived from supplementary material aren't there in all cases--new characters like Izayoi and Harley come off older than the barely-past-twenty series median, while the previously youngest of the young Porom and newly playable Luca are now in the upper threshold of permissible age ranges for women at 22 and 21, respectively. And you thought
The After Years had little going for it!
As stated, I doubt anyone's been totally unaware of this status quo that's been in place for more than thirty years, but I've found it gratifying in looking at other series of comparable vintage and (one hopes) status, such as
SaGa, and how they've historically handled things. To note, the same bias exists here in the comparative emphasis for female youth and male seniority, but in much smaller doses, and less limited in the contexts of what kind of roles women are allowed to have, in what degree of prominence, and how old in the portrayal. I don't even have to dig into the supporting character rosters or twist the definition of what "main series" or "fully playable" even means; all the examples below are protagonists from
SaGa games, even the most mildly exceptional of which blow past anything
Final Fantasy has ever allowed the women in it to be:
- the four leading women in Romancing SaGa: Aisha at 16, Claudia at 22, Barbara at 26, Sif at 28. I make mention of them all, including the teenager, because if you add all of their ages into a sum total, it comes out to 92--the same total the four analogous men end up with. I'm especially fond of this detail, accidental or not, as even when there is a woman of notable maturity present in an ensemble cast like this, usually there's a man just a few years older there as well to maintain these gendered power dynamics. Here, at least, a sort of aggregate parity is achieved.
- Katarina in Romancing SaGa 3, at 24, is nearly a decade younger than the oldest playable leading man in the game, and even then outside the reach of Final Fantasy's grasp.
- Emelia in SaGa Frontier, also at 24, is only a year younger than the oldest male lead in Lute. The restoration of Fuse into a protagonist role in the upcoming HD remaster will muck this up, however.
- Laura in Unlimited Saga, at 30, is one of the oldest leading women in the genre. Again, there's a dude hovering around just a few years her senior, but at least she's the most prominent character in promotional art for the game.
- finally, Scarlet Grace does not provide exact ages for its cast as far as I know, but from contextual writing, character design, and presentation, I'm confident in Taria, the witch-cum-potter, as being one of the oldest woman protagonists in the genre, once again. Whether that's late twenties, somewhere in the thirties, or even forties, that's up for anyone to decide for themselves, but it's all plausible in the treatment.
And so on. Who really knows all the reasons for the differences between the series, but women in prominent creative roles or the lack of them seems like a good starting point; Tomomi Kobayashi as character designer is attached to nearly all of the
SaGa examples above, while similar roles in
Final Fantasy have been driven and defined by people like Yoshitaka Amano, Tetsuya Nomura, Akihiko Yoshida--wonderful artists all in their own way, but notably lacking in how they portray women in pretty much every facet of their creative process.
Akitoshi Kawazu as the longstanding head writer for
SaGa has always done a more diverse job of depicting women in his games either of his own wont and will, or arrived at it through cooperation with others--such as Squaresoft scenario writer Miwa Shoda, who's definitely credited as co-writer for
SaGa Frontier (the Mystics scenario was her work, as per the
2nd Div developer's room, and supported by her thematically similar gothic and queer work in penning the scenario for
Nights of Azure, nearly twenty years later) and might have worked on the sequel too; the writers are unlisted, and she again worked in conjunction with Kawazu around the same time on
Legend of Mana. Shoda has a writing credit for
Final Fantasy XII as well, but conjecture suspects it was not as in major a capacity as some of her other work in her time with the company. Or maybe I'm just grumpy about how Yasumi Matsuno writes women, because I often am.
Most of
Final Fantasy has been written by men, legions and committees of them, throughout the series's history, with only a select few exceptions here and there, like Soraya Saga's contributions to
Final Fantasy VI. It's only in more recent years that women have been able to write for the series in more prominent capacities, like Saori Itamuro as lead scenario writer for
XV (beholden to Kazushige Nojima's original draft), and the much-celebrated Natsuko Ishikawa as the lead writer for the more recent
XIV expansions. The presence of women in major creative positions does not always lead to an automatic sense of better representation for women in the resulting work--women can write women (and men) badly; men can write women well; men can take good ideas presented and conceptualized by women and make them unrecognizable, etc.--but it's one of the things one hopes signals better days for the series, in contrast to how it's historically fared at the subject.
