Everything Everywhere Once A Week (11/04/2022)

Welcome to Everything Everywhere Once A Week, the weekly newsletter where I run down some news in games from the past week. Well, usually that’s the case, but this week it’s a COVID edition. After nearly three years of dodging this ridiculously communicable airborne disease, I finally got infected due to a flight from Baltimore where some guy in our row who insisted “it was just a dry cough” refused to put on his mask. And of course there’s no more rules saying he has to, so I’m probably not the only person he gave COVID to at that time.

I remember, in the first year of the pandemic, thinking I would very likely die if I got COVID. Being diabetic and having a weakened immune system already, also not having health insurance due to being between jobs, I’d probably have tried to wait it out and not been successful. I’ve had flus that knocked me flat on my ass and by all accounts this seemed worse. It’s a testament to the vaccines and boosters that I’m able to sit here writing this as well as I am, as those things kept COVID from just destroying me.

Anyway, the one benefit if any is that I was able to take this time to finish Bayonetta 3.

Something You Might Not Have Known About Bayonetta 3

A question that got asked a lot since Bayonetta 3’s announcement was a fair one: what on Earth took so long? We’re accustomed to games coming out usually within a few years of their announcement, but Bayonetta 3 ended up sliding just under the five-year door.

The answers are mostly not shocking — it was announced very early, there was a pandemic that really slowed things down, the initial director left fairly early on in the project, etc. But another reasons that most people don’t know is that, at one point in development, Bayonetta 3 was scoped as a semi-open world game.

The design was going to draw more off Astral Chain than Nier Automata, but the idea was that a large hub world would send Bayonetta (or whoever else) to different worlds which would themselves be fairly open. Maybe Super Mario 64 would be a good reference point for this. There was a lot of work and experimentation on this idea, but it kept falling apart when it came to pacing, and eventually Nintendo wanted them to scale back. It was, I hear, also not particularly well-performing on the Switch hardware either.

There’s still a lot of vestiges of the semi-open world design in the final game. The hub world, Thule, is broken up into smaller pieces that Bayonetta and Viola navigate to get into the next major world. The chests were redesigned a bit to be searched for in larger areas and provide a lot more variety to make use of the environment. Even the various weapon transformations were going to play into traversal a bit.

This was never a meaty enough story to report as its own thing, so it feels like it can slide in here and no one is going to care in a negative way after the game itself is already out.

I’m of the opinion that if it didn’t work and the developers don’t think it worked, then we’re probably not missing anything huge. Still, Platinum Games tends not to throw away old ideas, so I would not be shocked if something else gets this treatment later.

Also I liked the game. Finished it today. Very easy to see where the supposed cameo Taylor was offered was going to fit in and, had she taken it, I think people would have been celebrating that role.

Final Fantasy XVI is Too Realistic for People of Color

IGN had a fantastic interview today with the leads of Final Fantasy XVI, including well-known straight shooter Naoki Yoshida. The interviewer, good friend Kat Bailey who has her own Patreon here, asked Yoshida about the lack of people of color in Final Fantasy XVI. Yoshida said, well, let me just post the quote here.

Naoki Yoshida, Producer: This is a difficult question, but not one that was unexpected, seeing as diversity in entertainment media has become a much-discussed topic as of late. The answer I have, however, may end up being disappointing to some depending on individual expectations.

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. When deciding on a setting that was best suited to the story we wanted to tell—the story of a land beset by the Blight—we felt that rather than create something on a global scale, it was necessary to limit the scope it to a single landmass — one geographically and culturally isolated from the rest of the world in an age without airplanes, television, or telephones.

Due to the underlying geographical, technological, and geopolitical constraints of this setting, Valisthea was never going to realistically be as diverse as say a modern-day Earth...or even Final Fantasy XIV that has an entire planet (and moon) worth of nations, races, and cultures at its disposal. The isolated nature of this realm, however, does end up playing a large part in the story and is one of the reasons Valisthea’s fate is tied to the rest of the world.

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.

Conversely, the Final Fantasy series of games have always inherently dealt with conflict and struggle, especially between the empowered and those used and/or exploited by those privileged few—a prominent trend in human history. In a game that, by design, allows players to experience that conflict and struggle first- hand through dynamic, realistic battles, it can be challenging to assign distinctive ethnicities to either antagonist or protagonist without triggering audience preconceptions, inviting unwarranted speculation, and ultimately stoking flames of controversy. The best part of pulling inspiration directly from history, however, is that it allows us to revisit and re-examine our own pasts, while also allowing us to create something new.

In the end, we simply want the focus to be less on the outward appearance of our characters and more on who they are as people—people who are complex and diverse in their natures, backgrounds, beliefs, personalities, and motivations. People whose stories we can resonate with. There is diversity in Valisthea. Diversity that, while not all-encompassing, is synergistic with the setting we’ve created and is true to the inspirations from which we are drawing.

So, hrm. Where to start. First of all, if you knew this question was coming, how the fuck did you end up with this answer? How did Square Enix PR not go “Hey, they’re going to ask you about how this game is whiter than a Downton Abbey fantasy camp, let’s think of a good answer” and immediately shove “We’re going for realism” into the trash bin?

Second, let’s talk about the fallacy of historical accuracy for a bit here and how it works toward a self-reinforcing end result of the white default. Yoshida points out here that what they were going with in Final Fantasy XVI is realism with some magic on top of it and that it doesn’t really make sense for a medieval country that is isolated from the rest of the world to be ethnically diverse. I’m going to take issue with that because it only doesn’t make sense because you say it doesn’t make sense.

You created this world! You’re basing it off the existing idea that people of different races largely stayed homogenous for much of our existing history and going “Oh well that’s just how it works then.” It works that way because one continent colonized a lot of the world, wiped a whole bunch of other people, enslaved a continent and outlawed intermingling, and then found itself largely genetically homogenous through a plague. If you’re going to say, yeah, FFXVI worked exactly like this also, then damn, get some better writers. It’s like me being asked to worldbuild for my fictional fantasy story by starting with “A man started typing in Google Doc at his desktop computer…” and patting myself on the back for it.

Also, historically speaking, this is not true. There were all sorts of people of color in these historically white countries, people that were born there after generations even. You wouldn’t even need to tell a story of emigration and could still have a cast roughly as diverse as Big Bang Theory.

The reason anyone, and I’m presuming Yoshida is included in this, thinks that it was this completely immutable mass of white is because media keeps reinforcing that. And media keeps reinforcing that because media before them kept reinforcing it. Final Fantasy XVI is falling into the same pattern that caused this problem in the first place and using that problem to justify the decision they made.

It's also especially weird coming after Final Fantasy VII Remake, which was surprisingly diverse and had plenty of NPCs of color wandering around Midgar.

Anyway, we can stick this one on the board next to a “very hip-hoppy kind of walk.”

A Yakuza Quote I Keep Forgetting

When I was in Tokyo two months ago, I had this quote from RGG Studio head Masayoshi Yokoyama I keep forgetting to post here. I asked him if Ichiban Kasuga, Yakuza: Like A Dragon protagonist and Dragon Quest fan, would have played Dragon Quest XI.

“Absolutely not,” Yokoyama said. “He does not have that kind of time.”

As I transferred everything to my new OLED Switch this week and made the call to really, actually, for sure finish DQXI this time, I can relate.

This Week is Iffy

I’m hoping to be back in time to record Materia Possessions this week, but if not I’ll make sure everyone else gets on some microphones to talk about it. If I’m not, well, hopefully there will be something!