wantstobelieve:

bikiniarmorbattledamage:

“WTF is he wearing?” “Ewwww that design!”

Morrigan submitted:

So the new pictures released for Mevius: Final Fantasy (iOS/Android though supposedly a “console-style” game) shows a dude in, shall we say, an outfit familiar to this blog… except it’s usually worn on female characters.

But that’s okay, I mean, I’m sure the reactions will be like “oh it’s just fantasy”, “he’s confident and doesn’t need real armour”, “it’s stylized”, “he chose to dress like that”… right?

Right? xD

(…) While screencapping the worst comments from that forum thread, I also noticed lots of other posts being like “I don’t mind sexy male armor, BUT this particular one is just a shitty design, period.”, which is an argument far removed from the reality of current game industry.

The thing is, we’re waaaaay past the “badly designed sexy female armor” quota, so there’s lots of “badly designed sexy male armor” quota to meet. And until balance of the two is restored, I don’t really think anyone is in the position to request male sexyness to be up to some arbitrary design quality standard.

I’ll also hold my final judgement of the whole game’s art direction until we get to see female characters for comparison. After all, FF titles provided us with some major Female Armor Bingo material before. (…)

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*puts on character designer glasses*

While I fully support the female gaze and agree that most of these comments displays a double standard, I can’t dispute that the armor (and tattoos esp.) looks shitty. Coming from such a well-known developer, it feels awkward and amateurish. May I present Sydney and Ashley from Square’s highly-acclaimed Vagrant Story as counterpoint:

Barely functional? Check. Stylish? Check. Coherent? Double check. Also VS is a PSX title, with processing power far below that of current mobile devices. Not even the pixelated visuals could hide how well-balanced Ashley’s butt outfit is.

Also in the category of ‘oh god are you seriously fighting in THAT’ is Vaan from FF12:

Again, and since Yasumi Matsuno knows what he’s doing, the design is strong with well-contemplated details. 

So yeah, Square has done sexy male outfits before, which makes this particular designwork neither good nor revolutionary, and I can’t really blame anyone for not taking it seriously. Yes we should wait for the actual game before passing serious judgement, but in terms of design I can understand if some feel it lacking.

Developers may make outfits as nonsensical and gratuitous as they want but good designing effort also must be worked into it, since it will absolutely show. Just because a bunch of het dudes would settle for poor female armor design as long as it’s skimpy doesn’t mean we have to for the sake of disrupting the status quo or whatever. I don’t think equality means settling for scraps just because it presents an illusion of temporary relief from the usual deprivation.