#^ i do not know how the recent mainline animal crossing games handle this but i do know they were boy/girl selections in the original game

[technoxenoholic]

they're definitely not common, but there are games with canonically nonbinary human characters, and there are games where you can PLAY AS canonically nonbinary human characters, either because nonbinary is an option in the character creator somehow or because the pre-existing character that you play is nonbinary. i'm going to list some that i already know about; feel free to add on if you have more examples.

in story of seasons: a wonderful life, the 2023 remake of harvest moon: a wonderful life and harvest moon: another wonderful life, you can choose from three sets of pronouns when creating your player character at the start. selecting they/them makes your character nonbinary -- other characters will refer to your character without using gendered terms. your character is a human (although they are also called a nature spirit at one point -- it's unclear, but it probably just means they're attuned to nature rather than nonhuman).

in apex: legends, one of the playable characters, bloodhound, is nonbinary. as far as i can confirm online (as i'm not familiar with this example myself), they are human.

in undertale, you play as frisk, who is nonbinary. they are explicitly referred to as human in-game.

in deltarune, you play most of the game as kris, who is nonbinary. they are explicitly referred to as human in-game.

in pokémon go, the team mystic leader blanche and ultra recon squad representative rhi are both referred to with they/them pronouns by other characters during some special research cutscenes (although these are infrequent). blanche is definitely human, although i'm not familiar enough with the ultra megalopolis lore to know if rhi also counts. you can also customize your player avatar's body shape without gendered limitations (there is no actual gender selection in the game after the avatar overhaul).

[tearasshouse]

Attack on Backlog 2017 - No. 9 

Final Fantasy XV

Breakdown: PS4 version at 80ish hrs for the Platinum. Plenty of post-game content left undone; plenty of pre-timeskip content left untouched; figure I’ll go back to the game someday (ha ha, not likely) and be like, oh wow, this single-player MMO still has a lot of questing left for me to do, cool (but that won’t happen).

Final Fantasy 15 is a big, beautiful, incomplete, incoherent but ultimately fulfilling and worthwhile experience that won’t disappoint if you have realistic expectations. So, it’s kind of like being in a relationship! Hah. Speaking of relationships, like the ones depicted in this game, and also like my own with the FF series...

TL;DR time! So far I’ve gotten as far as: 

Sephiroth’s fight in FF7 where I parked my characters outside of the crater and went, Nah, putting a stop to that glorious (ly pathetic) summer where I spent my 13th or 14th birthday leveling up Materia or something. Whew. Somehow I just lost the nerve to continue despite grinding for hours upon hours. I didn’t even have KotR, so naturally I skipped Ruby Weapon and that just made defeating Sephiroth kind of... pointless?

disc 3 in FF9, but because I’d neglected and refused to learn Tetra Master up to that point, I pretty much hit a roadblock and could not progress. Thanks a lot! Thanks a fucking lot. I really liked this FF. The soft limits on class specialization, with the way weapons conferred different skills to different party members, but everyone could use pretty much anything, the soundtrack, the characters; a lot of it was great. Ditto about the story tho, wasn’t paying attention ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

fhe first 5 minutes of FFIV on the NDS.

almost 50 hours into Bravely Default, but put it down because the storybeats were just too inconsistently delivered, the grinding, though greatly alleviated with some QoL features, was still a huge grind, and something about the game just... never clicked.

taking a glancing look at copy of FFX/X-2 HD and putting the thing down because I have commitment issues.  

the first 15 minutes of FF Type-0 HD.

and whoa, before I forget, Steam says I have 13.2 hours in FF13. So there’s that. Great music though! Paradigm Shifting is cool in theory too, I guess. But this game is just awful. And now I want to go back and play it. Why do I do this?

All in all a very poor showing from me. FFXV was, comparatively speaking, way easier to dig in. “A Final Fantasy for fans and first-timers” they say. Well, I’m not sure if I fall into either of those camps. I guess I am a fan? Sorta? I couldn’t tell you about the lore, plot or characters of many of the games, but I do own one of these. And I used to listen non-stop to shitty low-bitrate .mp3s of Nobuo Uematsu’s soundtracks on my Walkman. And I had wallpapers of Rinoa and Yuna, and still own a really embarrassing FF8 wallscroll that was gifted to me?

So! As a casual fan then, I found this one... pretty good. I mean, there’s elements of every past Final Fantasy in its DNA. It feels like a Final Fantasy game, which is to say it feels like the ones which came after 12, which did the most to change up the ATB/turn based combat, and perhaps the composition/interaction of the characters, outside of maybe Tactics or 11. 

There’s so much to like here that I’m willing to forgive its shortcomings and missed potential, even if, by the end, the things it gets right is in equal measure to the things it misses the mark on or flat out lacks. It has so much charm and warmth that I’m willing to forgive Square’s misguided reach for critical mass market appeal what with its numerous marketing tie-ins and cross-promotions, or its divvying up of exposition to tie-in films and DLC. At least it gave us that ridiculous Cup Noodle quest line. At least it gave us that. I’m even willing to forgive Chapter 13, and I didn’t even play Verse 2.

I’ve not followed the game at all, so its understandable the ones who clamoured for something like Versus XIII would be a bit irked. All those amazing tech demos and trailers they’ve released over the years? I understand the pain, but ya’ll only have yourself to blame for buying into the pre-release footage. 

Yes, the Insomnia chapter was wholly underwhelming. Yes the pacing is weirdly rushed after you’ve hit Altissia onwards and becomes hyper linear. Yes Lestallum and Altissia are in general hilariously undercooked, non-interactive, tiny and I haven’t encountered something this disappointing since maybe hitting Markarth in Skyrim, where the magic of Skyrim’s first 50 hours really started to wear thin. We’ve truly hit a point where graphics tech has outpaced the ability and feasibility to render more organic, more reactive and believable AI simulation in towns and cities. Maybe all this increased fidelity strikes a dissonance with how we think worlds should be populated and behave? I don’t know. Witcher 3 looks incredible though, and perhaps that’s the game that shows you can have your cake and eat it too. Meaty, meaningful content that isn’t just throwaway Hunt quests, or helping some asshole with his car troubles for the umpteenth time. I’m of the opinion that all sidequests in RPGs devolve into kill or fetch quests, and the rare exception requires you to talk your way to success or solve some kind of puzzle and mechanically speaking there isn’t a whole lot you can do. So, that’s where good writing comes in. Fallout New Vegas, if I recall had fantastic writing in this regard. More recently NieR Automata had really rudimentary sidequests that were carried along with quirky written snippets that expanded upon the world. Then there’s the Witcher games and to a lesser extent the Yakuza series that construct entire stories around side content. Yes FFXV’s sidequests are... uniformly underwhelming. They’re all more or less MMO-like filler content for the sake of inflating the completion time and giving you some kind of incentive for exploring the world. And yes, Luna and Noct’s relationship is hilariously undercooked; she does her Aerith moment and it’s tits up from that point on. It’s a shame you can’t be with Iris though the game teases this; Aranea only shows up to do her thing and disappears; Cor straight up disappears; Gentiana does her thing and disappears, etc. People just disappear, for no apparent reason other than selling you DLC, or they didn’t know what to do with these characters because they are plot movers, nothing more. Sigh.

But you know what? It’s been awhile since I’ve played something like the first half of the game so yeah, sure, whatever. Throw on a podcast and go about overleveling past the main campaign. Go ahead and throw on that FF13 soundtrack and go pick up nutmeg (such a great soundtrack). 

Speaking of which, I loved the music. I might even call it majestic. I loved oddball world design of mashing what seems to be not-Southwestern & not-Pacific Northwestern USA with not-Venice, briefly not-Rivendell (Tenebrae?) & not-Tokyo. I loved playing grab ass with my boys after camping out in the mornings. I loved Ignis being the mom friend and the my headcanon where the guys store all their cooking and crafting ingredients in the same astral plane where Noctis keeps his weapons. I loved the photography feature and Prompto’s arc. I fucking loved fishing more than I thought would. I loved that there’d always be some kind of incidental dialogue when you’d go exploring or take up a quest. I loved that Bahamut had a creepy human face. I loved how dangerous and crappy the Reglia Type-F is to handle. I loved that Gladio would give Noct shit, even undeservedly at times. I loved that Regis and his crew went on a similar journey all those years ago. I loved that there’d be super high level mobs just chilling in the overworld and that level scaling isn’t a thing, but there would still be things that could one-shot you. I can appreciate a game that helps me with completing its campaign, even if it does so kind of forcibly, since open worlds tend to induce some kind of completion anxiety in me. Will you please go and fucking fight Ardyn already? 

About that fighting: I like it? I briefly tried Kingdom Hearts on 3DS and it was... It was not great. But I like the automation in this that allows for just enough player input where positioning and timing is more important than anything else. It’s not very strategic, and you don’t have much in the way of tactical forethought, but it looks cool! Props to Square’s animation team for blending all of it together into a somewhat coherent whole. It’s mostly flash, with just enough engagement to not be a entirely mindless affair. 

I think at the end of the day we all have some kind of preconception of what we wanted FFXV to be, and we were all left somewhat disappointed that it didn’t turn out to be that figment of our fancy. But it exists, its more than playable, there’s a lot to do and soak in and those post-credits scenes with Noct and the lads, and Noct and Luna with the photo you chose were enough to wash away the cynicism and disappointment. 

It feels like, with the completion of the Episode Ignis campaign and the successful rebirth of A Realm Reborn, Square might finally close the chapter on 13/Versus 13/15 and do things a bit better and more efficiently. Or maybe we’ll be subjected to a mobile hell and more games in 15′s mould, the latter of which wouldn’t be the worst thing? I keep saying it but I never follow through with going back to play the older mainline FF games. Now’s the time! Maybe.

[app-oh-sigh-oh-pieces]

#and now for some games that i know of that DON'T count: #in the sims 4 you can customize your sims' gender expression/body/pronouns but it's janky and they're still male or female under the hood #in animal crossing pocket camp (and presumably in complete) you could wear anything regardless but could only select male or female #^ i do not know how the recent mainline animal crossing games handle this but i do know they were boy/girl selections in the original game

So ACNL was similar to Pocket Camp, in that you could wear anything but your character was binary gendered. Buying clothing of the "wrong" gender would prompt a reaction from shop NPCs (like "oh that's for girls, but I guess you could wear it too") .

For ACNH, they ask you at the top if you're 👧 or 👦 (which is at least an upgrade from the confusing cool/cute binary of games past) and then this information is never used in the English release; everyone just calls you "they." Presumably in languages where everything is unavoidably binary gendered, they call you he or she based on that choice.

For games though: Desta: The Memories Between is about a character named Desta who explicitly refers to themself as nonbinary!

Venture (Sloan Cameron) from Overwatch 2 is also canonically nonbinary and is confirmed by devs to use they/them pronouns.

they're definitely not common, but there are games with canonically nonbinary human characters, and there are games where you can PLAY AS canonically nonbinary human characters, either because nonbinary is an option in the character creator somehow or because the pre-existing character that you play is nonbinary. i'm going to list some that i already know about; feel free to add on if you have more examples.

in story of seasons: a wonderful life, the 2023 remake of harvest moon: a wonderful life and harvest moon: another wonderful life, you can choose from three sets of pronouns when creating your player character at the start. selecting they/them makes your character nonbinary -- other characters will refer to your character without using gendered terms. your character is a human (although they are also called a nature spirit at one point -- it's unclear, but it probably just means they're attuned to nature rather than nonhuman).

in apex: legends, one of the playable characters, bloodhound, is nonbinary. as far as i can confirm online (as i'm not familiar with this example myself), they are human.

in undertale, you play as frisk, who is nonbinary. they are explicitly referred to as human in-game.

in deltarune, you play most of the game as kris, who is nonbinary. they are explicitly referred to as human in-game.

in pokémon go, the team mystic leader blanche and ultra recon squad representative rhi are both referred to with they/them pronouns by other characters during some special research cutscenes (although these are infrequent). blanche is definitely human, although i'm not familiar enough with the ultra megalopolis lore to know if rhi also counts. you can also customize your player avatar's body shape without gendered limitations (there is no actual gender selection in the game after the avatar overhaul).