Various stuffs about FF

[A Black Falcon]

Yes, Rena is the healer of the group, but they are three optional female characters that are great fighters.

And Rena actually has decent (not fantastic, but decent) normal fighting capabilities and has offensive spells as well, so at least she's not just a dedicated healer who has no other real purpose like SOME characters (see Lucia in Lunar DS for instance...). I played as Rena and spent most of my time doing attacks, not healing people. But she is still the healer.

Anyway, sure there are other female characters as well, but virtually all JRPGs with party-based game systems have some female characters in the party, and because of the design of the games (and the genre) they fight... and in some ways that is an element of greater equality. That doesn't mean that the themes and character designs that go against that should be ignored, though.

I was speaking more specifically about Ren and Tlatchga.

Ah. Sure, I guess, though the plot and other characters are an extremely small part of the game...

On another note... Tlachtga v. the Hexer cartoon... polar opposites... :D

Hexer

Diary: I don't get it... The man at the Guild hasn't hired me.

I cursed him so he can't do anything but find me a party, so where's my party already!?

I thought not letting him eat or sleep until he finds me one would do the trick...

Hmm... It has been a week, I guess. I wonder if the man is still alive? Maybe I should have fed him, at least...

Well, for your benefit I will explain.

Valkyrie Profile - You play as a female warrior who leads the souls of the fallen to Asgard in preperation for a great war.

Odin Sphere - The "level select screen" is about a little girl who reads various stories. One of the first stories is about the daughter of Odin who's a warrior and the leader of an army. There are other stories, but that's the only one I've seen so far.

Magical Starsign - You can play as a male of female character, I think the same goes for Children of Mana too.

Generation of Chaos - You can play as various countries and one of the main characters is a leader of a unit of knights, who also happens to be female.

Know nothing about Generations of Chaos. What is that for anyway? PSP?

Odin Sphere has five characters and you play as all five. It's three of one gender and two of the other I believe, but I forget which is which. You don't choose characters, you just play as all five in order.

Valkyrie Profile... a game I'd like to play if it wasn't so ridiculously expensive... I have heard that it does a pretty iffy job with the Norse myths it's supposedly based off, but oh well. JRPGs usually are very, very loose with consistency to their source material... annoying, but true...

Magical Starsign -- yeah, it's an RPG where you choose between a male or female character. What I want to know though is if the plot or text changes between the two... is it a "silent protagonist" style where your choice doesn't matter, or does the main character actually talk and interact and does gender choice change anything? Though you don't really have to change MUCH even in a game with a talkative main character, as the Summon Night Swordcraft Story games show... :D (those games are so great... and often funny...)

Anyway, as for Sword of Mana, it does have character choice, but they are two completely different characters with somewhat different paths and plots, and the character you play as talks a lot. Which is fine, but they often don't hear eachother so you really need to play both sides in order to get the whole story... just like Star Ocean: The Second Story. There is just one ending of course, and an ending that was derived from the ending to FFA (though like much of the rest of the game the tone was changed dramatically from FFA's hopelessly depressing-seeming ending to a "somewhat sad but with a happy tone" ending in Sword. I liked it better the first time.), unlike Star Ocean 2, but still... I don't know. Maybe it's just that Sword wasn't actually that great of a game (not horrible, but not great) that's making me question it... :D Gender-wise I guess it does decently, faint praise as that is compared to its significant faults.

Oh yeah, and the heroine is the magician while the hero is the warrior, falling into the common stereotypes. Why not just let you choose your character development... they let you do that somewhat with the different classes to level up, after all... they just didn't go all the way.