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The story
An episode where Hironobu Sakaguchi, regarded as the creator of the Final Fantasy series, reportedly said “I want the healer to be a woman — I don’t want to be healed by a man,” while the FF15 team, whose party consisted of four men, responded “That wasn’t possible,” became a hot topic on 5ch’s gaming hardware board. The thread explained that the reason FF15 ended up with an all-male party traces back to the director change from Tetsuya Nomura to Hajime Tabata — by that point the party lineup had already been publicly announced and couldn’t be changed. Discussion expanded into comparisons with Dragon Quest and Fire Emblem, which feature more female healers, FF’s struggles in sales, and opinions on so-called “political correctness,” without reaching any single consensus.
What people said
Here you go: FFX-2
Being all-male is fine, and having a handsome prince as the protagonist is fine too?
But normally, the side characters would be like a grizzled old guardian, or a rough, tactless old guy playing the mentor, right?
Is there any popular story anywhere, in any era, about four handsome guys just hanging out together?
Try flipping the genders — it'd basically just be Hyperdimension Neptunia.
FF15 basically ended up being a female-targeted Neptunia made with an absurd budget.
Wait, was the Yōkai character from the Lamine family actually a girl…?
I was hoping 'it's Fabio, so it's definitely a woman!' — but then it turned out to be a Yōkai, and that's when I realized the Dietrich route is basically a joke. I did Leda's route first and Dietrich's second, so the drop in quality is brutal.
Fujoshi were already all over it back in FF6 and FF7.
It wasn't the main point, but there was a running joke about leaving the healing to Minea while Crift just waits in the carriage. I think it even got turned into an AI-generated video.
FF6 and 7 only ended up catering to that crowd as a side effect — FF15 is a different story, it was a serious, deliberate push for 'FF Girls'-side appeal.
That's really not the thing to experiment with on FF's biggest title ever, and its first open-world action game…
They had to somehow finish off the unfinished material Nomura left behind by the deadline, so there wasn't time to make that kind of change. Also, the party lineup had already been revealed in promotions before Tabata took over, so it couldn't be altered.
FF-bros love to treat FF like some anti-PC champion, but FF barely sells anymore and nobody even pays it attention. Meanwhile, the anime-style games FF-bros look down on are actually selling better in Japan, lol.
The dress-up (Dressphere) system in FFX-2 was fun, though.
Gacha and anime-style games are the mainstream now, so that's actually the market FF is worst at. Take FF7: Ever Crisis, which was reeling players in with Tifa's sexy outfits — it shut down its service just yesterday.
Games where the protagonist doubles as the healer are pretty common, but I'm not a big fan. The protagonist should be the attacker — objectively, that's also what appeals to a wider audience.
FF16 had one, didn't it? Forgot her name, but the Shiva-bonded woman.
That's exactly how 'Libe Saga' (the Romancing SaGa -Minstrel Song- remaster) does it.
Background and Key Points of This Topic
FF15 originally began development as “Final Fantasy Versus XIII” under Tetsuya Nomura’s direction, and after a long development cycle, Hajime Tabata took over and completed it. The thread notes that by the time of the handover, the all-male, four-person party lineup had already been publicly announced in promotions, making major changes difficult on the production side. Hironobu Sakaguchi, the person credited with the remark, is the “creator” who worked on FF1 through FF9, and was not involved in making FF15. The sensibility of the early series — where female White Mages became the standard healer — and FF15’s design built around an all-male protagonist team are products of different eras and different teams, so treating the two as reflecting one single decision can be misleading. The thread’s discussion expanded into comparisons with Dragon Quest and Fire Emblem, which feature more female healers, FF’s struggles in sales, and debate over so-called “political correctness,” but no unanimous conclusion was reached.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware & Industry (Gaming Hardware)) thread “FF’s Creator: ‘I Want the Healer to Be a Woman, I Don’t Want to Be Healed by a Man’ — FF15 Director: ‘Can’t, lol’.”
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