And then they took it Up To Eleven with a certain sports crossover: Personally, I'm calling it canon.
That list of names is interesting. You'll notice there is actually a male name on the White Mage list: Noah. The rest are definitely female names, though. The Black Mage and Red Mage name lists, however, are full of both male and female names, which is odd, because they have both always been considered male, especially the Red Mage.
Well, while the story likely isn't canon, the decision to make one of the characters female clearly shows the company itself views its character as being female, or at least that the character can be considered female.
Well it's a newer thing. Things change with time, probably because new persons come in the company. Like how Frioniel/Firion changed from brown/red hair to white. In any case, for SMBC, I think they can be called "Warrior", "White Mage", etc.
I definitely agree that White Mage likes like a female. I would have thought that the 4 adventurers (Warriors of Light) would be different sprite choices in the character selection screen like Bass is an option in Mega Man, but that description of how they would operate sounds excellent. Maybe one day in the future we will see a Warrior of Light (Warrior of Lights? Warriors of Lights? Lorriors of Wight? <--- these are jokes) in SMBC.
After seeing that picture and the fact that even one of Final Fantasy III's four generic characters were seen as female.According to a comic or manga in Japan as well as Refia in the DS version and soon to be released in Japan PSP version. I'd say White Mage is female. Then again the characters of FF1 could well be left to imagination anyways.
It is likely that Square changed their stance at one point. In the original, the White Mage and especially White Wizard looked rather like a male, and in FFIII the four characters were all young boys, but the White Mage class still resembled that of the White Mage in the first game. It wasn't until FFIV that the White Mage started to be associated with females, with Rosa and Porom as the game's White Mages (and Rydia had white magic as a child). Then in FFV the White Mage class for the female characters looked more like the original White Mage design with the hood up. Then, much later, there was Garnet in FFIX who was a White Mage/Summoner, and then Eiko who was the same, and then Yuna in FFX was also a White Mage/Summoner. It seems Square probably retconned the first game's White Mages to be females, and has stuck to that ever since.
I think they're all intended to be gender-ambiguous, but White Mage is female when the issue is directly addressed.
My best guess after looking at the sprites is that white mage and white wizard were both intended to look ambiguous--though with a hint of the feminine. The cloak hides any gender specific traits, but that could have been because they couldn't create a sprite that looked definitively one way or the other. The long red hair of white wizard looks feminine enough. The idea of a priestess as the only female character in the group isn't surprising since it plays on gender stereotypes (war nurses, etc.) given white mage's abilities. Mario was designed with a hat because they couldn't design hair that moved and his moustache was designed so you could tell he had a nose. It wouldn't be too outrageous to infer that white mage was intended to be female and was designed ambiguous given the limitations of the sprite.
So I wonder if switching between the characters if the names and portraits would change to match? Instead of just saying Warriors it would switch from Fighter to Thief to White Mage to Black Mage.
I don't think we got far enough along to decide on that part, I think at one point I was considering a portrait that somehow fit the four of them and just having their name set to Warriors of Light or something.
They never had an in game portrait like most FF characters so... For they're portraits just the four warriors of light over world sprites in a square formation. It would be cute.
Does this mean they've officially been dropped? Unless there's a major technical obstacle preventing them from being in the game, I'd still be interested in playing as them someday.
I was going to a suggest a "final fantasy mode" where the levels are re-designed in a way that the warriors could walk through and then engage goombas and stuff in turn-based battles. or maybe, just let them run and jump high enough to clear the obstacles, and when they touch an enemy a battle begins. That way you wouldn't have to redesign levels.
