Light Enough Skin and White Enough Voices: The Problems and Contradictions of Racial Diversity in Final Fantasy XVI
“Our design concept from the earliest stages of development has always heavily featured medieval Europe, incorporating historical, cultural, political, and anthropological standards that were prevalent at the time. [...] Ultimately, we felt that while incorporating ethnic diversity into Valisthea was important, an over-incorporation into this single corner of a much larger world could end up causing a violation of those narrative boundaries we originally set for ourselves. The story we are telling is fantasy, yes, but it is also rooted in reality.” – Naoki Yoshida (IGN, 2022)
Final Fantasy XVI, after much conversation made by lead staff about its intentions to restore the series’ seemingly lost prestige has settled into a largely familiar space for new entries in the series. An initial positive critical reception, though still one step removed from the universal critical acclaim of the series’ supposed golden age, gives way to a tensely mixed response from the fanbase who pick up arms, draw lines of control, choose their arms and armour and descend upon the discursive battlefield to determine whether its more misogynistic to have badly written female characters or to critique them in Kotaku articles. I don’t wish to relitigate arguments over the game’s basic quality but if I must preface my feelings on it before engaging with the material I wish to, I find Final Fantasy XVI a disappointment. The infrequent spectacle of the Eikon boss fights cannot compensate for its dull characters, rote gameplay and a central concept that the writers are clearly too in over their heads trying to handle in a deft manner. FFXVI, however, was a site of controversy long before its release based on comments made by producer Naoki Yoshida on the game’s racial diversity and its genre. These two facets of controversy are perfect points to give way to a complex discourse on Final Fantasy’s unusual aesthetic and generic position in the medium, which I do wish to litigate. In this first piece, I want to talk about race.
While even the Famicom and Super Famicom Final Fantasy games aimed for high quality graphics relative to their hardware, Final Fantasy VII onwards Square began a march towards realistic character rendering as an aesthetic pillar. While Dragon Quest or Kingdom Hearts sought to perfect their simulations of manga/cartoon-ish art, Final Fantasy’s characters were real people, with real features. Square’s artists, however, were not prepared to abandon one artistic principle driving the ease of exportation of post-war Japanese popular culture – the notion of mukokuseki (無国籍, ‘stateless’) aesthetics, most often translated as cultural odorlessness. This is a term that’s relatively prominent in, even foundational to, Japanese (and following the Korean waves broader East Asian) pop culture academia but obscure in more casual discourses in the West. To not get into the academic weeds here, Koichi Iwabuchi in Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism singles out the three Cs of ‘comic books, computer games and consumer electronics’ as lacking in ‘cultural odor’. While one can observe Japanese design philosophies and aesthetic preferences in these products, they do not produce images of Japanese bodies and experiences. This is of course easily contentious two decades on, when one can observe that this ‘odorlessness’ itself is seen as a Japanese or East Asian aesthetic language among western audiences. But an easy comprehension of this contradiction is thus – Japanese pop culture (broadly) does not feature Japaneseness but do feature a set of aesthetic signifiers that have now been understood to be Japanese within the global system of pop culture circulation. ‘Spiky hair’ and ‘big eyes’ are not Japanese features, but they are features of Japanese pop culture aesthetics for an easily understood example.
Final Fantasy’s march towards realistic character rendering has aimed to retain this mukokuseki aesthetic language, which causes a dire contradiction. Real people have real features, which are sometimes racial signifiers. The more realistic the characters are, the more realistically ‘ethnic’ they can look. The series has struggled with this the moment the technology has enabled it to struggle – the pre-rendered CGI cutscenes in Final Fantasy X clearly give Tidus more Polynesian features, as does Lightning look more caucasian in Final Fantasy XIII’s CGI scenes. Still, Final Fantasy characters do not generally speaking belong to specific real world cultural backgrounds or ethnicities. Cloud Strife or Squall Leonhart are not meaningfully speaking, ‘white’. They are culturally odorless dolls. There are, however, a few Final Fantasy characters who cannot avoid this unspoken deracialisation. Barret Wallace or Sazh Katzroy cannot avoid being ‘black’ in the same way Serah Farron or Noctis Lucis Caelum avoid being ‘white’. There are writers better suited to exploring the successes and failures of these characters as black characters, I only wish to point out this contradiction that arose the moment the Silicon Graphics machines in Shinjuku began to spit those polygons out. I am of course intensely salty that Fang and Vanille were given Australian accents in the English dub of FFXIII when Gran Pulse is evidently a South/South East Asian-coded civilisation, but Fang especially exists in the ethnic and cultural ambiguities this mukokuseki approach makes possible. Even a character wearing a sari from a culture where pet robot dogs are named ‘Bhakti’ (the Sanskrit word for devotion) can be rendered odorless with light enough skin and white enough accents.
Light enough skin and white enough accents is indeed the approach Final Fantasy XVI takes to its racial diversity, but this is complicated by the fact that Valisthea is explicitly not a culturally odorless setting. If Yoshida is taken at his word, it is ‘incorporating historical, cultural, political, and anthropological standards that were prevalent at the time [in Medieval Europe], whereupon ‘over-incorporation [of ethnic diversity] could end up causing a violation of those narrative boundaries’. I do not honestly believe that Naoki Yoshida is a racist person, but this is simply a racist statement that betrays sheer ignorance of ‘medieval Europe’ as a cultural space that one can only land at through one’s only engagement with it being through abstracted facsimiles in fantasy fiction. Medieval Europe was obviously ethnically, religiously, and ideologically diverse even if it wasn’t egalitarian! Even if one were to stick to one region like the Iberian Peninsula, violent conflicts drawn on such lines like the Reconquista or the Spanish Inquisition were not ‘reassertions of realistic narrative boundaries over the over-inclusion of ethnic diversity’! It’s a brazenly crass way to speak about this matter, even accounting for any ambiguities in translation – but it does hint towards an unusual approach for Final Fantasy in racially defining its characters. Clive Rosfield, unlike Cloud Strife, is white. So is his brother Joshua, mentor Cidolfus, and the very many other characters in Final Fantasy XVI. Is Final Fantasy XVI a game about ‘whiteness’? Not at all – its whiteness is simply an aesthetic referent towards the works of fantasy that influenced it. Jon Snow is ‘white’ therefore so is Clive Rosfield, simple as that! Where does that leave the ‘right amount of inclusion’ for Medieval Europe that is surely found in the game?
The Republic of Dhalmekia is a mercantile federation clearly inspired by North Africa and the Levant. Dhalmekia has deserts and oases, majestic domes and blighted shantytowns, rugs and carpets and perfumes, scheming viziers and wile merchants. But are Dhalmekians a ‘divergent race’ to the rest of Valisthea? Let’s take a simple aspect of worldbuilding – names. Dhalmekians have names that aren’t culturally divergent from the rest of Valisthea – or do they? Where Rosarians are analogous to the British, the Sanbrequois to the French and Waloeders to the Norse, Dhalmekians are outright deracialised, deprived of any particular real world cultural referents in a game where other cultures are afforded it. Dhalmekian names range from Germanic ones like Hugo to made up fantasy ones like L’ubor., but never ones of any Arabic or Levantine or North African origin. If you are capable in your work to include specific real-world referential material in all other cultures, why stop here? Here’s the problem – despite all such attempts at deracialisation, Dhalmekians remain strange stereotypes. There is, for example, a minor antagonist, one of Hugo Kupka’s lieutenants, described by the subtitles as ‘Suspicious Character’ who would, in a more explicitly orientalist work be easily described as a scheming vizier. Final Fantasy XVI seeks to solve this problem with giving him light enough skin and a white enough accent! What remains in the game is an Orient, and Orientalism, but without any Orientals. One can observe a similar phenomenon in Denis Villeneuve’s film adaptations of Dune, where the obviously Islamic aesthetic and cultural references in the source material are toned down in order to avoid controversy, whatever that may involve. Cowardice is the tone of our contemporary blockbuster visual culture. This deracialisation of Dhalmekia where Oriental visual aesthetics without Oriental faces and voices is the upper limit of the ethnic diversity Valisthea can hold in its capacity is downstream of the contradiction within the game’s central conceit – magic slavery. FFXVI borrows heavily, not from historical practices of slavery – the game is confused on whether it is a chattel slavery system or a feudal underclass really, but from historical images of slavery. And it wants to lean into these images – of slaves in bondage, of slaves transported on ships, on slaves enduring dehumanisation and abuse of all kinds – without stoking any controversy based on racial depictions. To avoid such controversy, in the series’ most realistic game yet, they have to make this one specific culture in the game less real people with less real features. In the most explicitly real-world analogous culturally odored game in the series, this one people have to have their odor removed.
What Final Fantasy XVI fails to understand is that you cannot simply avoid controversy while also recreating all these images and even stereotypes. An orientalist caricature does not stop being an orientalist caricature if you sloppily make him sound like he frolics all day in the Yorkshire Dales. This is where Final Fantasy’s 25 year march towards realistic character rendering has taken it – a head on collision with conversations on race and fantasy fiction it is simply not equipped to handle and could have easily avoided. This is not to say that Final Fantasy XVI’s race problems are entirely caused by unfortunate priorities resulting in contradictions – the weird Islamo-Irish (?) syncretism of the Iron Crusade is really baffling and I honestly do not know what I can even say about that when the game is so deeply disinterested in portraying anything about them beyond ‘foreign religious fundamentalist barbarians’. And of course, I have avoided saying anything in detail about the failures of the central slavery analogy itself, on which I simply am not learned enough to discuss in my view.
Race is not the only aspect in which Final Fantasy XVI collapses under its own contradictions, but genre will have to wait for now.