Tifa’s Breasts Were an Important Design Discussion at Square Enix for Final Fantasy 7 Remake
Square Enix is coming out with a remake of one of the most popular games in its Final Fantasy franchise, Final Fantasy VII. The trailer emerged during E3 with a lot of excitement around it and the return of its iconic characters. Among them is the badass Tifa, and her character design in the remake was apparently a very important issue with developers. Mainly her breasts.
There is an ethics department at the video game developer, and one of their concerns was giving Tifa a design that was more “athletic look,” according to Eurogamer:
“Nomura says in the interview. For the developers, modernising Tifa’s design meant creating an athletic look, complete with abs, while retaining her iconic white tanktop and black mini skirt outfit. But, as the ethics department pointed out, Tifa shouldn’t look “unnatural” during action scenes, so her chest was “restricted”. This resulted in black underwear and a fitted tank top for the remake.”
I was told today that “video game boob ethics” is my thing, and it’s something I feel quite proud about if I’m being honest. Now, as a very busty woman myself, I understand the counter argument that this can sound like it’s implying that women with larger chests can’t be athletic, but I don’t think that’s what the developers were trying to do here. The original Tifa design is very fanservice-y, and while … yeah, I enjoyed it as a boob lover and boob haver, it doesn’t mean that the design didn’t exist to be erotic.
I’m an actual person and this is my body. I wasn’t designed by a team of mostly male game developers to attract gamers.
I’m here for there being big boobs in video games, but I’d like for the design of these women to be based on realistic body types. You want to give these women huge jiggle boobs, cool—let’s see them have fuller bodies, bigger stomachs, let’s render a nice FUPA. Let’s give them some badass sports bra designs. I just went to an event and got a free yellow Nike sports bra and I feel like I can take on the world in it while looking pretty cute.
I’m glad that the developers wanted to give Tifa a body that reflected who they saw her as, both as a fighter and as a person, because fundamentally that’s what good character design should do. When you have characters like Power Girl, a comic book character whose large breasts original exist because the artists wanted to see how big they could make them without being called out, it doesn’t create the kind of trust that designers are making these “sexy” characters for anyone else but themselves and male audiences.
So I’m happy about this change because just as with Mortal Kombat and DoA it shows a real desire to create great female fighters and not just fan-service. You can have sexy characters and sexy game design without being full of objectification.
Or even better we can have enough diverse body types in video games that we can have a while rage of bodily diversity for women so we can play as whatever size we want!
(via Eurogamer, image: Square Enix)
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