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sc94597 on 06 January 2016
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VXIII said:
sc94597 said:

I am not a (modern) feminist, nor a woman. I find the lack of female playable characters annoying - not on grounds that it is sexist - but because it impedes my ability to role-play. I like to experience different perspectives and create my characters abilities around said perspectives in my JRPG's and removing a whole gender from the equation just makes it bland. It would be less annoying if it was for a more interesting reason than a "road-trip" theme. I think the "road-trip" idea is unappealing as well. I was hoping it would comprise only a small segment of the game (20-30% at most) but unfortunately it seems as if it will last for most of it.

Cold war > war > losing homeland > staying on the road because there is no place to return to > whatever comes next. 

Reducing that series of events to "dudes on a road trip" is taking things out of context and making uneducated guess based on it. The journey is meant to be full of emotions and meaningful events.

Anyways, all male party is a new take in the Jrpgs scene. People demanding female characters for the sake of "diversity" are really demanding the game to be more of the same when it comes to the characters.To be exactly like previous FFs and the majority of Jrpgs out there. They are really asking for less diversity on the bigger picture if you think about it. Style over substance.

All of that could've been done without eliminating playable female characters. The reason for, as noted in the OP, the exclusion of female characters was to implement the guys on a road trip/journey trope that is found in a lot of fiction. That isn't new nor diverse. 

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RoadTripPlot?from=Main.RoadMovie

In my opinion the "Walking the Earth" trope that previous Final Fantasy games implemented is superior to the Road Trip trope because the world is more fleshed out, and there is no pressure to limit the type of characters you have purely for some cliche'd theme about the other gender. 

Considering the game is suppose to be part of the rpg genre, I think freedom of role-playing trumps top-down presentation. If he wanted to make an action-adventure, that is an entire different thing. People have different expectations from different genres.