Original post: https://bsky.app/profile/rebeccamwrites.bsky.social/post/3m6a62btty226
Here’s the dataset and their website if you are interested, there’s more games beyond Final Fantasy that they’ve looked at.
Main findings
- 35% of words were spoken by female characters.
- 29% of characters were female, which suggests the imbalance is driven by a lack of female characters.
- 94% of games had more male dialogue than female dialogue.
No Final Fantasy III?
I think they are still working on FF3
Shocking that x-2 doesn’t break 50% but also that VI is so low given that the main character is a woman (that said a fairly terse one) and another one sings an entire aria.
Do one where it measures dialog between 2 women.
X-2 suprised me there
FFXIV does not have proper statistics, but it does have a very large page of analysis, and I have a definitely unbiased opinion that it would score well. There are more “neutral” characters than one would expect, and a lot of them in an almost gender-fucky sort of way? Which is very cool. XIV stays winning.
My final fantasy is that my stupid wife who I hate quiets down so me and the boys can talk about where we’re going to allocate our stat points
wild to think that x-2, xiii and xiii-2 all have more male than female dialogue, makes me think that maybe there’s an error in the data.
This doesn’t seem right for X-2. All three party members are female, the villain for the first couple arcs (LeBlanc) is female. Just by glancing at the script there is not a whole lot of male dialogues
https://www.neoseeker.com/finalfantasyx2/faqs/69600-final-fantasy-x-2-script.html
Maybe Brother’s word count is double-counted? Brother speaks in Al Bhed and the subtitle would show both the Al Bhed and English translation
It looks like the scraper python script pulls the game script from here: https://www.ffcompendium.com/h/faqs/ffx2scriptaschthehated.txt
I’m not familiar with X-2 or their method for parsing the game script, but the project doesn’t look too hard to set up and you can submit issues on their GitHub so if you want to take a look I would say go for it. If they made a mistake I’m sure they would like to know
Looks like all Al Bhed dialogues might be double counted. The script there contains:
Brother: Duu cmuf! (Too slow!)
Brother: Cbrana fyja yhymocec lusbmada! (Sphere wave analysis complete!)
Brother: Haqd cdub: Gagazet! (Next stop: Gagazet!)
Gippal: E ryja ymnayto ehdanjeafat people. (I have already interviewed people.) Uha uv oui kioc dyga ujan. (One of you guys take over.)
X-2 being less than 50% is wild when it’s the girl pop game
For a split second I was truly shocked that any of the games managed to top X-2 then I realized it was Lightning Returns. Makes sense haha
FFIV and the male urge to go to the moon
We Moomin over here!
I agree the core issue is less female characters of course, but I also know that JRPGs tend to be plagued by long-winded male monologues, especially from villains.
EDIT: Was just thinking, I’d be curious to know how Chrono Trigger holds up regarding this. I remember the game having pretty great writing for the female characters and even had an openly
non-binarygender non-conforming character which was neat for a 90’s SNES game.Chrono Trigger is in their dataset, I was curious as well and went to check:
- 13.7% (31 / 226) of characters are women
- 35.7% (13,571 / 37,982) of words spoken by women
- 37% (5,021 / 13,564) of sentences spoken by women
- 38.1% (1,638 / 4,187) of lines spoken by women
I thought it was interesting as well that 51 of the 226 characters were classified as neutral. Probably because of all the monsters and Nu? But I’m not sure.
Probably a combination of robots and monsters, in addition to Flea
Thanks for pulling this data btw! I guess 38% isn’t bad relative to other JRPGs but I would’ve thought it might be a bit higher given how many prominent female characters there are in that.
prominent female characters
This is the next question I’ve got, maybe the bulk of the difference is in minor NPCs who have 1-3 lines of dialogue each.
My brain is not doing critical thinking right now. Does that mean women are overrepresented in dialogue because they speak more than the % of characters that are women? That can’t be right because you’d never expect all speaking roles to be equal. What can you interpret from that data point?
OK, so again I got curious and went to take another look, and there’s also a stats_by_character.csv file in their repo. So I just went and found the numbers for each of the party members and added it up to see how that changes the stats.
Character Lines Words Sentences Crono 193 (9.4%) 324 (2.5%) 348 (5.8%) Frog 281 (13.8%) 1,824 (13.9%) 929 (15.4%) Robo 279 (13.7%) 2,305 (17.6%) 898 (14.9%) [Spoiler!] 129 (6.3%) 1,054 (8%) 568 (9.4%) All Men 882 (43.2%) 5,507 (42%) 2,743 (45.6%) Marle 472 (23.1%) 2,912 (22.2%) 1,285 (21.4%) Lucca 442 (21.7%) 3,289 (25.1%) 1,294 (21.5%) Ayla 244 (12%) 1,402 (10.7%) 696 (11.6%) All Women 1,158 (56.8%) 7,603 (58%) 3,275 (54.4%) Totals 2,040 13,110 6,018 Women party members making up the majority of dialogue makes sense to me since Marle and Lucca are both introduced so early and make up a large share of the total. Again makes me curious what it would look like if we expanded the pool a bit to just exclude unnamed characters. I get the feeling it would shift back towards men making up the majority of dialogue, but that’s just vibes. Side note, I find it really strange that Crono has almost 10% of the lines, but the links to the scripts they used don’t appear to be working for me so I can’t check what they count as a Crono line. My guess is dialogue choices are attributed to Crono? But even then that seems surprisingly high. In any case, I figured I should include it to be consistent with their data. This is pretty interesting to me though so I might try setting their project up locally later so I can mess with the data some more.
Again makes me curious what it would look like if we expanded the pool a bit to just exclude unnamed characters. I get the feeling it would shift back towards men making up the majority of dialogue, but that’s just vibes.
There are still quite a few important non-party characters who are female I think. Queen Leene, Schala, Queen Zeal, Queen Azala, off the top of my head. The gurus and characters like The Chancellor, Ozzie have a lot of dialog too though from what I remember.
My guess? Among the minor characters who only get a handful of lines, most are men (pulling up the % male character average and pulling down the % words spoken by men average).
I don’t think I can answer with any confidence, but my guess is that most of the minor NPCs with only a little dialogue are men. So even though men make up an overwhelming share of all characters, the women that are in the game play a more prominent role on average. I’d be really curious to see this recalculated with just, say, named characters to see how much the data shifts and if my guess is on point at all.
Who was gender non-conforming? Lucca, or Robo?
Flea
Tactics missing and I bet it does better
“I wish FF4 had more feeeeeemale (
) dialogue”[A FINGER ON THE MONKEY’S PAW CURLS]
The Magus Sisters now have an unskippable 45-minute FMV cutscene
Seriously, though; what the hell is with Rosa’s abject lack of characterization? I guess you could blame the lack of space on the ROM, especially if some stuff was cut from the English translations, but even then I really doubt Ted Woolsey had all that much to work with. I’m not mad, just disappointed. Be better, 1990s Japan.
looks like XIII went woke. thankfully XV was redpilled to make up for it and provided an almost female-free experience
