Original post: https://bsky.app/profile/rebeccamwrites.bsky.social/post/3m6a62btty226
Here’s the dataset and their website if you are interested, there’s more games beyond Final Fantasy that they’ve looked at.
Main findings
- 35% of words were spoken by female characters.
- 29% of characters were female, which suggests the imbalance is driven by a lack of female characters.
- 94% of games had more male dialogue than female dialogue.
Shocking that x-2 doesn’t break 50% but also that VI is so low given that the main character is a woman (that said a fairly terse one) and another one sings an entire aria.
X-2 suprised me there
FFXIV does not have proper statistics, but it does have a very large page of analysis, and I have a definitely unbiased opinion that it would score well. There are more “neutral” characters than one would expect, and a lot of them in an almost gender-fucky sort of way? Which is very cool. XIV stays winning.
My final fantasy is that my stupid wife who I hate quiets down so me and the boys can talk about where we’re going to allocate our stat points
wild to think that x-2, xiii and xiii-2 all have more male than female dialogue, makes me think that maybe there’s an error in the data.
This doesn’t seem right for X-2. All three party members are female, the villain for the first couple arcs (LeBlanc) is female. Just by glancing at the script there is not a whole lot of male dialogues
https://www.neoseeker.com/finalfantasyx2/faqs/69600-final-fantasy-x-2-script.html
Maybe Brother’s word count is double-counted? Brother speaks in Al Bhed and the subtitle would show both the Al Bhed and English translation
It looks like the scraper python script pulls the game script from here: https://www.ffcompendium.com/h/faqs/ffx2scriptaschthehated.txt
I’m not familiar with X-2 or their method for parsing the game script, but the project doesn’t look too hard to set up and you can submit issues on their GitHub so if you want to take a look I would say go for it. If they made a mistake I’m sure they would like to know
For a split second I was truly shocked that any of the games managed to top X-2 then I realized it was Lightning Returns. Makes sense haha
looks like XIII went woke. thankfully XV was redpilled to make up for it and provided an almost female-free experience
X-2 being less than 50% is wild when it’s the girl pop game
FFIV and the male urge to go to the moon
We Moomin over here!
I agree the core issue is less female characters of course, but I also know that JRPGs tend to be plagued by long-winded male monologues, especially from villains.
EDIT: Was just thinking, I’d be curious to know how Chrono Trigger holds up regarding this. I remember the game having pretty great writing for the female characters and even had an openly
non-binarygender non-conforming character which was neat for a 90’s SNES game.Chrono Trigger is in their dataset, I was curious as well and went to check:
- 13.7% (31 / 226) of characters are women
- 35.7% (13,571 / 37,982) of words spoken by women
- 37% (5,021 / 13,564) of sentences spoken by women
- 38.1% (1,638 / 4,187) of lines spoken by women
I thought it was interesting as well that 51 of the 226 characters were classified as neutral. Probably because of all the monsters and Nu? But I’m not sure.
My brain is not doing critical thinking right now. Does that mean women are overrepresented in dialogue because they speak more than the % of characters that are women? That can’t be right because you’d never expect all speaking roles to be equal. What can you interpret from that data point?
OK, so again I got curious and went to take another look, and there’s also a stats_by_character.csv file in their repo. So I just went and found the numbers for each of the party members and added it up to see how that changes the stats.
Character Lines Words Sentences Crono 193 (9.4%) 324 (2.5%) 348 (5.8%) Frog 281 (13.8%) 1,824 (13.9%) 929 (15.4%) Robo 279 (13.7%) 2,305 (17.6%) 898 (14.9%) [Spoiler!] 129 (6.3%) 1,054 (8%) 568 (9.4%) All Men 882 (43.2%) 5,507 (42%) 2,743 (45.6%) Marle 472 (23.1%) 2,912 (22.2%) 1,285 (21.4%) Lucca 442 (21.7%) 3,289 (25.1%) 1,294 (21.5%) Ayla 244 (12%) 1,402 (10.7%) 696 (11.6%) All Women 1,158 (56.8%) 7,603 (58%) 3,275 (54.4%) Totals 2,040 13,110 6,018 Women party members making up the majority of dialogue makes sense to me since Marle and Lucca are both introduced so early and make up a large share of the total. Again makes me curious what it would look like if we expanded the pool a bit to just exclude unnamed characters. I get the feeling it would shift back towards men making up the majority of dialogue, but that’s just vibes. Side note, I find it really strange that Crono has almost 10% of the lines, but the links to the scripts they used don’t appear to be working for me so I can’t check what they count as a Crono line. My guess is dialogue choices are attributed to Crono? But even then that seems surprisingly high. In any case, I figured I should include it to be consistent with their data. This is pretty interesting to me though so I might try setting their project up locally later so I can mess with the data some more.
Again makes me curious what it would look like if we expanded the pool a bit to just exclude unnamed characters. I get the feeling it would shift back towards men making up the majority of dialogue, but that’s just vibes.
There are still quite a few important non-party characters who are female I think. Queen Leene, Schala, Queen Zeal, Queen Azala, off the top of my head. The gurus and characters like The Chancellor, Ozzie have a lot of dialog too though from what I remember.
My guess? Among the minor characters who only get a handful of lines, most are men (pulling up the % male character average and pulling down the % words spoken by men average).
I don’t think I can answer with any confidence, but my guess is that most of the minor NPCs with only a little dialogue are men. So even though men make up an overwhelming share of all characters, the women that are in the game play a more prominent role on average. I’d be really curious to see this recalculated with just, say, named characters to see how much the data shifts and if my guess is on point at all.
Probably a combination of robots and monsters, in addition to Flea
Thanks for pulling this data btw! I guess 38% isn’t bad relative to other JRPGs but I would’ve thought it might be a bit higher given how many prominent female characters there are in that.
prominent female characters
This is the next question I’ve got, maybe the bulk of the difference is in minor NPCs who have 1-3 lines of dialogue each.
Who was gender non-conforming? Lucca, or Robo?
Flea
Tactics missing and I bet it does better
“I wish FF4 had more feeeeeemale (
) dialogue”[A FINGER ON THE MONKEY’S PAW CURLS]
The Magus Sisters now have an unskippable 45-minute FMV cutscene
Seriously, though; what the hell is with Rosa’s abject lack of characterization? I guess you could blame the lack of space on the ROM, especially if some stuff was cut from the English translations, but even then I really doubt Ted Woolsey had all that much to work with. I’m not mad, just disappointed. Be better, 1990s Japan.
I’m convinced if VI gets a good proper remake and a marketing blitz to showcase all its positive aspects, including the banger opera scene - they should make a full opera score too. Drag Nobuo Uematsu out of retirement and partner him with Lorien Testard and Alice Duport-Percier exclusively to make a complete opera score. And probably a soundtrack remix because why not at that point. - and i believe it’ll be a hit to draw in the masses.
FF IV remake starring Joachin Phoenix as Kefka.
Dang that would be a good idea. Method acting with those silly tight spandex suits with the light bulbs on em might make for good cinema with him dancing madly
Now THIS is airship racing
Ff6 remake made by the frogs to include several mini games that are nods to other great and infamous games. One of them will be Star Wars Episode I: Racer
And you’re not allowed to progress past
Locke’sSetzer’s flashback sequence until you can beatRachelDarill ina podracean airship race, and she’s basically movie-SebulbaThe whole flashback includes about 12 hours of Gran Turismo-esque tuning for your airship as you go around
looting and pillaging dead people’s belongingstreasure-hunting to fund your airship modification journey, including “stage 3 weight reduction” which is literally just throwing out the casino staff and the roulette tablesEdit: I just 100% fucking conflated Locke and Setzer, didn’t I
And that’s purely “optional” side content you gotta do to reach the true ending. Mayne throw in some ass creed X being a deadbeat dad dogfather for shadow, Splatoon or Passpartout for relm, magicka or mage arena for Stragos, WWE for Sabin, satisfactory, that “Like a Dragon” mini game involving talking to women but failing every time but as an FMV CYOA with someone famous like Chris Carmack playing Edgar getting clowned on nonstop.
What else should be done for the other characters?
Edgar dodging Epstein allegations in court a la Phoenix Wright
Recettear minigame for a random merchant NPC in South Figaro
Dynasty Warriors sequence for Cyan’s battle against General Leo
Terra’s esper form turns combat into Child of Eden
Squeenix right now seems to want to chase success over acclaim. Real heads k ow Final Fantasy 6 was Square’s announcement to the world that a golden age had begun. People like to point to 7 because of the sales numbers, but that’s just when the public caught on to what was happening. You could make a case for 4 too, since it was a big step up in storytelling for the genre. But 6 is when Square seemed to realize the full potential of the medium and the genre to build a more complex story and genre.
It would sell, but it doesn’t market itself as readily as 7 does. Theres not the same nostalgia factor in play for as many people, and square would have to work harder at the hype.
I agree 4 walked so 6 can run, firstly.
And secondly I agree, that the nostalgia-bait runs strong for the privileged Playstation petite bourgeois, enough so any money vampire would have to have their nose cut off to not smell the metric shittons of cash they’d make off of that nostalgia. But I make the case that they can make possibly even more money by cashing in on both the more limited nostalgia ff6 has and combine it with the internationally recognized prestigious acclaim the frogs made with their final fantastical expedition 33.
Hell just collab with sandfall to remake it.
It’s pretty funny that even in 13, where the MC is female and there are other central cast members who are too, it’s only in the third installment where they creep just over the line on this chart.
Same for X-2. How do you not crack 50% when all the principal characters are women?
That one got me. How?!
Brother and the Shinra kid talk too much. Also most of the generic npcs are men. Beyond that I don’t know.
