Why do 99% of videogames pander to white (especially American) audiences?

[Pristine20]

Kasz216 said:

Pristine20 said:

Kasz216 said:

Pristine20 said:

Ajax said:
Cloud, Zidane, Tidus and Vaan are all blond. And Squall is a blue-eyed dude with brown hair. But somehow not only the Americans and Europeans want it this way, but also the Japanese seem to like to have white people in their games, cause Square could have easily put more Japanese looking characters in those games if it wanted. But FFVII had at least real Japanese characters like Yuffie, Tseng and Hojo.

Square has also stated that the want to appeal to more international(white) audiences. Perhaps thats one of the explanations of removing all Japanese characters from the cast even though the main character has always been white anyway. Does it have to be this way or is Square just paranoid of having an FF that doesn't sell?

 

Yeah. Check the Final Fantasy's that were never even meant to come out in the USA.

Like FF7 actually. Which Square didn't even want to publish outside of Japan.

It's nothing to do with that when it comes to Japan.

But if you follow the trend for FFVII, the Japanese characters have dissappeared as the name "Final Fantasy" gained more popularity. The last iteration, FF12, has a totally white human cast. Reddas is the only dark-skinned person in the entire game! His existence is not even explained. Did his whole ancestry perish?

The other diversified creatures are the catwomen like Fran and the Lizardmen like Ba' Gamnan.

FF1 had nothing but white people in it. FF4 had almost all white people except for one race of Chinese... and Dwarves. FF6 had all "white" people and then some Espers... Shadow looks black...(or actually blue... but some africans saw themselves as blue rather then black) but in his flashback he's white.

FF5 had all "white" people... and werewolves... and 5 dwarves.

FF2 had one darkskinned guy. FF3 i believe had no one of a different race but i can't really recall.

In the case of Japanese artists it's really not pandering so much as they like variance... and the lighter skin really plays of color variance a lot.  It's what they like to draw.

As for the Half Japanese, i'd argue that has less to do with pandering and more to do with the legacy of the troops stationed in Japan... and the later influence of the US.

One of the arguements someone made (i'm too lazy to go back to check) was that in the pre-ps1 era, especially, you couldn't really tell what the characters look like so I don't know about the NES and SNES families.

However, after reading Ajax' discoveries, it would seem that the Japanese make games with white people in them to appease their own people as well since they are going as far as to have surgery to look white. If this holds, perhaps FF never really changed, its just the best of both worlds since 95% of gamers would be officially white if the Japanese gamers all get the surgery so since people want characters that look like them or look like they want to look, then FF can appeal to both westerners and Japanese with white characters in them.