Fantasy Life, Level-5’s semi-recent contribution to the Nintendo 3DS’s impressive array of games, is all about (as the title suggests) living your role playing fantasies. Although light on plot and structure, the game’s numerous character classes and the ease in which you can transition between them makes it a memorable and enjoyable experience. And the game certainly celebrates these open-ended, do-what-you-want game mechanisms, actively encouraging you to explore the benefits of all of these classes and everything the game has to offer. When I began playing Fantasy Life, I had a somewhat light case of starry eyes syndrome at all these possibilities. Did I want to be the Mercenary or the Paladin? What about the Magician or Alchemist? Understanding that, knowing my tendency to grind, I’d probably play through all of the classes at one point or another, I picked the Mercenary and set into the land of Reveria, a land where, despite this emphasis on choice, our culture’s ideas of gendered jobs still finds a way to permeate into the twelve classes.
As I previously mentioned, there are twelve classes (which they call Lives) to choose from: Alchemist, Fisherman, Blacksmith, Carpenter, Cook, Mercenary, Miner, Paladin, Woodcutter, Hunter, Magician, and Tailor. In order to guide you on your quest towards mastering your chosen career, you are assigned a Master who helps you learn the ropes and assigns you challenges, among other things. I was oddly anxious to meet my Mercenary Master; they avoided using names and sent me on a quest with only a directional arrow to guide me. Eventually, after wandering about a bit, I found him in the tavern. He was an older man, white haired and skinny, with a look that didn’t seem very “mercenary” to me. Although I wasn’t sure what to expect, a part of me was disappointed that, other than the decision to make him more of a knight than a typical mercenary type, the Mercenary Master was so… standard, so gender typical. The image of my cute, little badass Mercenary girl had filled my expectations perhaps a little too high. Although I know it probably wont mean much later on in the game, I wanted her to be trained and taught by another badass lady Mercenary.
The revelation of the Mercenary Master got me thinking. What did the other Masters look like? Were there perhaps other Masters who would fill my personal fantasy of breaking up the gender norms so often associated with rpg classes? Turns out, the answer is largely no. This was what I found after looking at all of the twelve classes and their respective Masters:
Male:
- Alchemist
- Fisherman
- Blacksmith
- Carpenter
- Cook
- Mercenary
- Miner
- Paladin
- Woodcutter
Female:
- Hunter
- Magician
- Tailor
Unfortunately, even ignoring the immense discrepancy between the number of male and female Masters (one female Master is not even human, she’s a female cat), it’s fairly obvious how traditional gender roles are manifesting in gender representation in Fantasy Life’s Masters. With the exception of the Hunting Master, the other two are jobs that might often be associated with female characters in fantasy and that have real world ties. Although there are no Magicians (unfortunately) in the real world, it can be interpreted as a role that, while still being a part of combat, fulfills an out-of-the-line-of-fire and more vulnerable position. Magicians or mages are generally weak in defense and placed behind the protection of a character with a more combative class, a stereotype attached typically to women. Likewise, a Tailor job harkens back to sewing, a traditionally female role. Even the Hunter Master, who is admittedly the badass I would’ve liked to have seen as the Mercenary Master, unfortunately can’t make up for the lack of female Masters and the generally stereotypical classes they’re given.
Does the game pressure you into choosing a certain Life/job based on your character’s gender? No, at least not that I’ve noticed thus far. No “you got beat by a girl!” comments were made when I rescued a male fellow Mercenary from monsters or comments of that nature. But would it be a stretch to have half the Masters be women and half be men? Would it not be a potent commentary on the tendency for games to follow these rigid gender-determined class standard to have, for instance, a male Tailor Master and a female Miner? For a game that boasts about having the freedom to be what you want and live your Life the way you want, it certainly doesn’t provide gamers with that impression when its Masters are confined to classes that are stereotypically assigned to their gender.
