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.
  • Demifriend [she/her]
    ·
    3 months ago

    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.

    • Carcharodonna [she/her]
      ·
      3 months ago

      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.