[kupoartist]

Vaan is wearing the world's most pointless waistcoat (it's hardly keeping him warm or protecting his modesty now is it?). It's hard to criticise the poor guy of course. Like turning up for work and finding your usually picky boss unable to criticise your uniform because actually, you're only wearing a fig leaf on your front side and are covering everything else with any available leafs.

Ashe looks like the girl who decided to play dress-up with her Big Sister's clothes. Only her sister was a transvestite hooker whose fetish for women's clothing was so great that she thought cutting clothes to shreds was a valid form of self-harm.

Balthier looks beyond acceptable, which is an achievement these days. Though those quasi-sandal boot things have got to go.

Originally Posted by Panuru

But these rings and bracelet are sort of question mark in the general picture.

Square-Enix are not ones to fuel the fires of Yaoi fanfiction

Fran is completely and utterly brilliant. Promotional shots of her should be distributed upside down so that randy guys on slow connections get fooled into experiencing sexual arousal from a woman with foot tall rabbit ears. The funny thing is, I swear they're photoshopped into every promo, like the guys at Square-Enix are purposely sabotaging what is an ugly mysogonistic nightmare of a character design and turning it into the circus sideshow of the century. Fran is designed to turn you into a Furry lover.

Basch is another victim of dress-up time. I haven't played FF12 yet, but from the outfit, I'm guessing his father is a notorious armorer in the land of Ivalice. You know, because it never occured to him that actually, the stomach is a good place to protect from magic arrows and sharp swords. Does he specially tailor for the chest-burster generation, who must experiment with strange alien eggs but don't want to ruin their armor? Or actually, perhaps he was fully aware of the stomach deficiency, but he didn't want to compromise the homoerotic dehabillitation effect that wearing a half-fastened girl's blouse has on opponents? So whilst the Ivalice in FF Tactics is The War of the Roses, FF12 is set in a time akin to some battle in Greece? A really sweaty, manly battle?

Penelo is probably one of the more normal looking characters. Well, by normal I mean 'fits into the FF third girl stereotype'. The Selphie Tilmitt one. She's loud, tomboyish and sports silly hair and something tight fitting and yellow. She also has a bottom that seems simultaneously far too big for what she is wearing yet far too inhumanly small at the same time. And what is with those giant leather bracelets?

Edit:
I think the general point is that Square-Enix thinks that because consoles are pumping more and more polygons every generation, they absolutely must up the detail level on their designs by over nine-thousand. Only, the best way they've come up with to do this is to put as many different outfits on a single character simultaneously. Oh for the days in which characters wore clothes composed of 384 dots.