There are tones of Archadian classism, yes, but these relate back to a much broader, big-picture depiction of imperialism and are shown as inherently bad. However, I do believe it is worth noting that within the scope of the game, there is hardly any sexism or racism shown towards viera. Somewhere along the way, the intentions behind Yoshida’s concept art became the portrayal of viera that we see in XII. If they were, we’d have Basch in knight armor and Vaan as a person of color. Simply put, I have more faith in Akihiko Yoshida as a character designer than that.īut video games aren’t made by a one-man team. I would like to think that the viera were not placed into Final Fantasy XII specifically with fanservice in mind. While palette swaps do a disservice to many of XII’s races (especially viera), they were necessary for making the game executable. While lots of different varieties monsters and backgrounds and NPCs were intended for the purpose of enhancing XII’s open-world feel, the game’s PS2 engine just couldn’t handle that much data. That being said, XII suffers from the technological limitations of its time. This is especially common with enemies (five million different breeds of wolf, anyone?), but this issue also extends to NPCs as well. In a sense, the viera’s lack of diversity in both appearance and clothing tie into one of XII’s biggest design flaws: an overuse of palette swaps. In Tactics Advance, white hair is apparently the most rare among viera and is considered sacred.) (This is something of a continuity error from Tactics Advance. In XII, however, there are only three different designs for viera NPCs: salve-maker, Wood-warder, and wayfarer.Īll of XII’s viera designs are fairly revealing, and all of them include white hair. (I also want to point out that Tactics Advance does have one male viera enemy unit, so male viera do, in fact, exist in-game.) ![]() ![]() Essentially, no two viera look alike in Tactics Advance. There are also variations in skin color, eye shape, and hairstyle… and enemy units are on a completely different color palette than party members. It’s hard to look at pixel sprites and make judgments of skimpiness, but I think it’s safe to say that there’s a good variety of skimpy and non-skimpy outfits. While I haven’t yet unlocked all possible viera jobs in my current save file of Tactics Advance, it’s pretty evident that the designs for each class differ greatly. In Tactics Advance, each race (hume, bangaa, nu mou, moogle, viera) has its own list of jobs to be unlocked, and each job has a different costume. The short answer: I think that the viera are an interesting concept from Tactics Advance that was rather poorly executed in XII. In all honesty, it’s a difficult and complicated question, and there are many things that are necessary to take into account when analyzing any of XII’s races. Every now and then, someone asks me what I think of XII’s portrayal of the viera.
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