Was Tifa ever made to be Asian looking?

[Dungeonmaster]

After thinking about that movie Advent Children which made them more realistic looking, Tifa actually looks different actually... not the breasts, big breasts is normal, i have seen girls with that big breasts, its not unnormal , same with Lara Croft from Tomb Raider. If you wanna see some unrealistic one. See the movie "The Dictator 2012"

Because when i played FF7 PS1. She reminded me of some school friend, except she was blonde with brown eyes. "though she may have dyed it sometimes"

In the game she has brown hair and brown eyes... Dont know about you, but she doesnt look very asian like. And Cloud and Tifa are friends, so having asian friends doesnt seem likely if you live in same nationality of childhood friends country of same race.

I may be overthinking it, but its just me from looking at the picture.

Edit: Btw having black hair doesnt automatically make you different race. Like i think of Garnet as European, even if she has black hair. Yuna on the other hands looks asian to me.

 

[fancy]

Yeah, she was made to look East Asian, specifically Japanese, in Advent Children,

Spoiler: (a good example here methinks)

but then, almost all of the FF women (and men) have Japanese features to them when they're portrayed in realism, presumably, because the teams working on them are, themselves, Japanese. From

Spoiler: Yuna

to

Spoiler: Noctis

. You create what you know.

Granted, one could argue that they are modelled after highly idealised standards of Japanese beauty and aren't representative of the general populace of Japan, but meh. That's another discussion.

I don't think the colours of their features are very significant when it comes to determining anyone's "race" in the Final Fantasy worlds (no race has naturally pink hair like Lightning in real life lol). I don't even think "race" is a concept that exists in any of the FF worlds to my knowledge? There are certainly different species, but, again, no one in any FF world thinks of race in the same way we do in real life, nor is it ever made a point of (again, to my knowledge--I haven't played every game).

Like, we physically see that Barret has African-American features and his skin is rich in melanin, but no one makes a big deal of it. The one feature that is noted and sets him apart from most people is his gun arm.

having black hair doesnt automatically make you different race. Like i think of Garnet as European, even if she has black hair.

Of course Europeans can have black hair. Have you seen Björk? Or Aidan "Sex Incarnate" Turner?

 

[Dungeonmaster]

Thats a good point. But its a fantasy world so anything can go i guess, they just dont care, if you are awesome then you are going in there. Which is why i hate the real world in general. Well not really, but everything is great in games, and then real life just is terrible in comparison to how awesome games are.

 

[Octo]

In Advent Children, Cloud, Tifa, Vincent and Yuffie look like Japanese people who have had a fuckload of 'westernising' surgery.

In the OG, everyone just looked like manga characters but there was nothing there to suggest Tifa was mean to be any different than Cloud ethnically.

 

[fancy]

You had mentioned (before it was edited out) how some people don't think of Barret as black, lol, and it reminded me of this plushie my brother had linked to me once upon a time. I've finally found it. The folks who made this plushie don't seem to think of Barret as black, either. xD

#IDontSeeColour

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

I have that plushie. I bought it at the end of a con because I couldn't bear to think of Barret languishing on the shelf unbought and unloved, but it REALLY upset me to see his pink skin. It's a travesty of Barret.

I agree with you, Sycamore, I don't think "race" is a concept that exists in the worlds of Final Fantasy, just "nationality" and "culture". The only instance I know of where a racial slur was used was in, I think, one of the FFVII novellas, when "flea" was used as a derogatory term for a person from Wutai. But that might not be a real racial slurs, but more of a national one, along the lines of the English calling the French frogs.

 

[ForceStealer]

and I always wonder the degree to which people ran with Rosso calling Yuffie a flea being a "slur." Wasn't she was just calling Yuffie annoying? After all, how many slurs involve saying the whole country of origin? Generally the whole point is to shorten the term. e.g. "kraut," not "German kraut"

 

[ChipNoir]

I think also motion capture has a lot to do with it. If they use facial motion capture, they're gonna use Japanese actors and their facial structure to work off of.

Course if its just hand animated, its kinda hard to work off of just pictures of western people. I remember an old interview where the developers of the first two Silent Hill games had a lot of trouble with designing specifically American characters, having no life models to work off of.

 

[Dungeonmaster]

I heard Squall from FF8 was based of River Phoenix

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

That's correct.

 

[Animexcel]

Tifa was always meant to look Japanese Animerican.

 

[Dungeonmaster]

Tifa was always meant to look Japanese Animerican.

But considering how much hentai they make... i am thinking they are believer in good gene pool, maybe the same reason porn became so popular in United States. Which i cant argue against.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

I didn't know the term "flea" was used in DOC. I'm pretty sure it's also used in Case of Yuffie to refer specifically to her Wutaianess. By some angry lady in a market if I'm not mistaken.

 

[fancy]

Tifa was always meant to look Japanese Animerican.

But considering how much hentai they make... i am thinking they are believer in good gene pool, maybe the same reason porn became so popular in United States. Which i cant argue against.

Haha, whaaaaaaaaaat? Pardonnez-moi, but I'm not following this argument. What's the connection between "good" gene pools and the popularity of pornography in the U.S. ? And, in turn, how exactly does that relate to Tifa's appearance?

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

I didn't know the term "flea" was used in DOC. I'm pretty sure it's also used in Case of Yuffie to refer specifically to her Wutaianess. By some angry lady in a market if I'm not mistaken.

I don't remember anything like that.

As for what Rosso called Yuffie, I believe it was ウータイの忍 ("Wutai no shinobu") in Japanese -- but she may not have been calling Yuffie herself something here so much as exclaiming over "Wutai sneakiness" or something like that. Probably hito could shed more light.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

So "flea" is something the translator added in? Clearly "忍" doesn't mean anything like flea. So that's even more proof that racism doesn't exist in their world. And why should it? It didn't always exist in our world either.

 

[Joker]

Tifa was always meant to look Japanese Animerican.

Source on that one?

 

[Obsidian Fire]

^I think that conclusion has more to do with how Nibelheim is portrayed as a creepy Western (as in the movie genre) town and how both Cloud and Tifa are translated in English (very informal and with terms like "mosey" etc.). Also, 7th Heaven has a very "Weastern" feel to it. It's even got "Texas" on the front of it!

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

I wonder - and this is me speculating wildly here - whether that's a lingering holdover from when Midgar was going to be New York... and Cloud and Tifa were two hicks from some backwoods nowhere town.

 

[Animexcel]

Tifa was always meant to look Japanese Animerican.

Source on that one?

From me, kinda said it for lolz. I have never put a race on Tifa. She is a work of fiction in a fictional world, so I rather put her in the anime race based on her first appearance of big eyes, small nose and mouth. If we wanna get real here, Tifa can be any race. Look at all the great Tifa cosplay we have from different countries. In b4 Man Tifa, just stop.

 

[Joker]

o I was hoping there was one

so I could tell my friend to stfu

 

[Animexcel]

o I was hoping there was one

so I could tell my friend to stfu

Well, don't let that stop you.

 

[Theozilla]

I think the best way to conceive of Tifa's "intended" race is to just treat it as similar to the way the Mukokuseki (aka the "anime" style") functions. It's basically an extension of the Default Human Being concept, so for Japanese audiences most of the characters are assumed to be functionally/analogous being "Japanese unless marked otherwise". Likewise, characters like Marge Simpson (who literally has yellow skin and a blue beehive hair) are understandably understood/interpreted as white Americans because of the cultural context in which they were produced. So depending how much one wants to argue stuff like Nibelheim/Midgar and specific names function as ethnic/cultural markers, I think the most definite thing you can say for characters like Tifa, Cloud, Aerith, Zack, Cid, Reeve, etc. is that they are analogous/function as ambiguously light-skinned Eurasians. Anything beyond that is likely determined by the background of the audience consuming the product. So for the average Japanese player, it wouldn't be at all surprising for them to interpret the majority of the FFVII cast as analogous to contemporary Japanese, while an average Westerner gamer could easily interpret them as white/European/etc. While characters like Barret and Yuffie Kisaragi, have much more explicit racial/cultural markers to them (so we easily understand that Barret is meant to be black, arguably even specifically analogous to black Americans, and Yuffie is explicitly East Asian analogous).

As for the CGI movies, like Advent Children and Kingsglaive, which used facial capture, the characters are going look more like whoever they decided to model the characters' facial features after. So Tifa in AC ends up looking more explicitly like Ayumi Ito (and thus more recognizably Japanese to global audiences), while Luna in Kingsglaive looks far more like Lena Headey than she does in the game proper.

 

[Channy]

Know what's interesting? Watch both versions of 1000 Words from X-2. There is a very definitive difference in Yuna and Lenne's facial features--and even Shuyin in a couple frames--from the original to the localization. I always wondered why they'd redone it, other than Jade doing a double vocal and Koda Kumi did just single? I dunno.

 

[Mage]

I remember having the conversation about Tifa's ethnicity when the game first came out. She and Yuffie aren't all that different looking feature-wise IMO (except

Spoiler: here

where you'll have to excuse the screencap for the in-game shade but Yuffie's skin looks marginally darker, so on that basis I took Tifa to be Yurpean/generic, and with Yuffie's Wutain background being strongly Asian, I just assumed that she was intended to be a more Eastern-Asian type ethnicity. Not that it particularly matters anyway, because eastern is more western in FFVII gaia anyway.