FINAL FANTASY XV, This is a fantasy based on reality.

[Fadedsun]

Yoko Shimomura on composer duty? This is going to be grand.

[Kevadu]

A fantasy based on reality... I'm actually curious as to what reality this is being based off of.

Probably the same reality developers live in with giant enemy crabs.

Giant enemy crabs are real!  What do you know, were you around in ancient Japan?

[Alisha]

sausage fest confirmed. no buy.

[Yggdrasil]

@Alisha:

[Hathen]

She'll end up buying it anyway, maybe at a reduced price, but she'll buy it. She's just trying to get a rise out of everyone. I'm curious though, would you rather they shove in a token female character(s) just to appease the lowest common denominator of bra-burning feminists (who don't actually buy video games)?

[Annubis]

feminists

You'd think a game with no women would be the safest way not to objectify them...
Sounds like a damned if we do, damned if we don't.

[Hathen]

This isn't really a case of objectification or not (That's never really been a complaint from Alisha, she at least knows what she likes, which is usually hardass asskicking females like Lightning), she's just displeased there's no woman asskicking in the party like there usually is. I can understand being disappointed or displeased with something like that, but having a token female character just for the sake of a girl in the team is something that should be restricted to Saturday Morning Rangers Hyper Squad shows.

[Yggdrasil]

You'd think a game with no women would be the safest way not to objectify them...
Sounds like a damned if we do, damned if we don't.

People is always going to tell the world in how many ways he or she is offended by who knows how many reasons. With the massification of the Internet this flow of "junk information" is most of the time always there for everybody to read and/or see which give even more people a reason to be offended about stuff that they never thought to be annoyed with, even though they are totally being blinded by the way one person sees the world through its own perception and not its own.

Also. The "complaint" of the male leads is a conscious decision made by the team and the Producer Shinji Hashimoto already hear about some of those complaints at E3 and he said that the feedback is going to be passed to the team. Don't expect seeing massive changes to XV at this point though because:

・SQEX always does its own thing.

・The audience for FF is all over the goddamn the place and we know that pleasing everybody aside from being an impossible task is also very stupid because the vision for many games has been lost over the years in an effort to please the masses that don't know shit about the project in the first place.

#pleasebeexcited

[Kevadu]

Personally, I would hope that the reason we won't see any massive changes is that the game is already far enough along in development that going back and adding a bunch of new characters wouldn't really make sense.  But maybe I'm just being optimistic...

[Dice]

I could see if a Kingdom Hearts thing happens.   Maybe one playable character in the first title (quite frankly, with Noctis' wheel-of-swords thing, would you want to play as someone else?  The emphasis seems to be on him -- but also, I'm not in the loop for news about this if they've said you can play as the rest of his merry gang), and in FF15-2 and 2-2 and 2-3 we can play as an expanded roster.

[Annubis]

The emphasis seems to be on him -- but also, I'm not in the loop for news about this if they've said you can play as the rest of his merry gang), and in FF15-2 and 2-2 and 2-3 we can play as an expanded roster.

Why not chapters like in Yakuza 4? I don't want to wait 4 games to play the guy I think looks cool.
With SE, 4 games might make me wait 24 years.

[(Tunnels)]

Is this really the whole party roster though? Or are they just the initial main characters? If it isn't confirmed that these five are it, and feel free to correct to me if so, I'm going to take a wild stab and say more characters will join you later in the game.

[Yggdrasil]

Is this really the whole party roster though?

Yes.

[Annubis]

There could always be a 'visitor' spot like FFXII though.
That was pretty neat actually. Felt awesome to have an extra character... kinda like approved cheating.

[Klutz64]

I have to admit that this will be the first Final Fantasy that I may not end up buying, and it's mostly because of those characters. Not because they're all male, but because there's just something... boring about that group. Most of the characters in FFXIII even had some sort of exaggeration that made them feel more interesting. These are all just a bunch of pseudo-Japanese dudes in leather.

I'll wait to pass judgement obviously until we actually know a lot more about the game and characters, but right now this is certainly not a "Shut up and take my money" game.