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are the people in the FF6 Europe/Caucasian? cause i think so. what do you think?
I know its not based on Japan in most part of the game though. and their clothes are European like too.

You are confusing skin-color with continental descent. The peoples of FF6 are certainly, at least by sprite and Amano's work, white-skinned. However, they're certainly not descended from European origins nor would their clothes and customs match. What they do wear borrows heavily from medieval traditions, though that's no surprise given their technological prowess closely mimics our own post-Dark Age.

The overwhelming dominance of a specific skin color heavily supports the apocalyptical scale of the War of the Magi. Simply put, most of the world's population was wiped out at genocidial levels. Those that managed to survive were all mostly of the same country and origin. After a thousand years, their slim genetic diversity has spread throughout the planet.

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Normally the creators of games don't include real-life things in their works. They wouldn't have the FFVI world in Europe, they create their own world. As for the clothes, I haven't seen too many Europeans that wear those kinds of get-ups.

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The characters are probably based on the people of Europe, since I find that a lot of the names sound a bit on the European side, but they are not European. They are [insert fictional nationality created for FFVI here].

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-Orgy, "Beautiful Disgrace"

Sure, they're from a fictional world where Europe doesn't exist, but I definitely get an Industrial-Revolution-Era Europe feel from a lot of the locations, like Figaro (Italian name, European style, whether it's in the desert or not) and Jidoor (feels Parisy, or again Italian to me). I think a lot of FF6 is inspired from Victorian-era Europe (with the notable exception of Cyan).

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I would venture that the character sprites follow caucasian looks more than others. A lot of anime doesn't really have the 'asian' eyes, so I'm assuming that their games wouldn't either. Also, it seems that Japanese games don't always have Japanese characters - even if they take place in Japan.

Basically I think they choose a generic-looking type of character that fits what type of nationality you want it to be. At least that's my take.

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"A little tight, but the price was right" - Locke
"Oh, what a Fuddy Duddy" - Relm
"..." - Shadow
"I'm a General, not some love starved twit" - Celes
"Although Edgar showers his attention on the ladies, most are smart enough to pay him no attention. Oh! King Edgar!" - Figaro Castle Inn Attendant

The Japanese aesthetic is that pale skin is beautiful, and they tend to draw round anime eyes (rounder than ANY race has in real life) rather than Asian-looking eyes, and of course they like the variety of having different hair colours. So (aside from the fact that Amano's art style has everyone pallid to begin with,) they're probably just making generically interesting/attractive-by-their-own-aesthetic-sense fantasy character designs.

I do think the world has a feel of being inspired by Industrial Revolution-era Europe. Of course it isn't actually Europe or any other place on earth, but all of the steam engines and the architecture and clockwork and things have that sort of "steampunk" feel to them, I think.


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- Sagiri -
"It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, and impossible to find it anywhere else."
:)

It's not European in the sense that none of the characters are from Europe, for obvious reasons, but they're still fairly distinctly white people/modelled on white people, in a settling that's essentially a European steampunk. Gestahl, I think, might be a notable exception, but it's hard to tell.

Other than appearence, though, things get blended. Cyan, at the very least, seems to connote a samurai, Japanese type. Terra's green hair is far more Japanese than EuroAmerican. Espers with names like Kirin.

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I hear the jury's still out on...science.

That's it, you people have stood in my way long enough! I'm going to clown college!

I'd say it leans toward European-style, but no where near as much as a game such as Dragon Quest does, cor blimey.

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Quote (silvermike @ 1st December 2006 20:09)

Gestahl, I think, might be a notable exception, but it's hard to tell.

I think Leo seems to be an exception, too. He's either deeply tanned or dark-skinned...

Cyan and Terra are both culturally Japanese-looking, but not necessarily racially so, because the art style isn't particularly strong on the differentiation between racial types. (Not that it really needs to be in FFVI's setting; I think the art is very appropriate.)

For realism, I would actually expect either racial homogeneity or racial differentiation by area on a fairly evenly-spread-out scale. FFVI makes more sense to me with its fairly homogenous characters than, say, FFIV, where everyone is Caucasian except for the people in Fabul, who are Chinese. It's like, "Hey, everyone in our world has mixed with each other enough to evolve pretty much the same characteristics, except for the people in one city that appears to have plenty of contact with its neighbors and so should have been mixing genes with everyone else as much as everyone else has." =P


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- Sagiri -
"It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, and impossible to find it anywhere else."
:)

the FF characters are white cuz thats who the Japanese are marketing to. Not to mention looking at Japanese multimedia, blondes seem to get a lot more spotlight than any other people. its all about appealing to egos. You'll never see a brown, yellow, red, or dark skinned FF character play the hero; maybe its threatening to North American, European, or even Japanese consumers to have coloured people in the lead role, again, ego, or maybe because the designers of the game chose to create a character they're familiar with, namingly anyone with a skin tone above brown. Not to call them racist, but thats the psychology of symbolism, even when Italian artists and sculptors were told to create images of Christ on the Pope's behalf, they could never create a Middle Eastern looking Jesus simply based on the fact that those outside of the Vatican's control, namingly non-Europeans, were the enemy at the time; so why not create an image people are familiar and comfortable with? A European Jesus. European characters for European customers.

Are they? I'm not sure the series was really aiming for the American market until the Playstation editions.

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I hear the jury's still out on...science.

That's it, you people have stood in my way long enough! I'm going to clown college!

FF was still being sold to North American and European markets before Playstation. Whaddya think the SNES and NES versions were for?

There's a difference between being translated and sold to a North American audience, and being designed for a North American audience. Based on the quality of the translation, it seemed like an afterthought. After all, the previous final fantasy didn't even get released here.

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I hear the jury's still out on...science.

That's it, you people have stood in my way long enough! I'm going to clown college!

Well, if we're going by translation then VII and T clearly were not intended for North American audiences. But VII and T were definitely marketed more in NA than their predecessors, and I think VI actually has one of the better translations in the series.

Anyway, I def think most of the pre-VII FFs have a European medieval feel, with VI upping that to European industrial. There are some exceptions here and there (Edge and Cyan). Why did Square do that? I have a whole theory on why some anime looks caucasian, and part of it has to do with marketability outside of Japan. I'm not sure if that was the case with the pre-VII FFs though, because Sqaure obviously didn't expect much success with them in NA and didn't even market them in Europe. But I would still say they were just following the general trend of anime in making caucasian looking characters.

I agree with MMB. The game wasn't made with white players to cater specifically to North American players. It almost seems a tad ridicuous to suggest so.

This post has been edited by Hamedo on 5th December 2006 20:51

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you now, at first i thought it was European... when i was like 7 or 8.MMB's got my vote.

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