Maxine Caulfield (Hannah Telle), Safiya Llewellyn-Fayyad (Olivia AbiAssi), and Moses Murphy (Blu Allen) take a snowy selfie in Life is Strange: Double Exposure (2024), Square Enix
A recent Square Enix investor meeting reportedly saw a shareholder directly press the company on their relationship with notorious video game diversity consultancy agency Sweet Baby Inc.
Formina Franklyn (Emiri Suyama) lays down covering fire in SaGa Emerald Beyond (2024), Square EnixThis event was first brought to public attention courtesy of one of the meetings apparent attendees, @Michsuzu, a Japanese blogger and YouTuber who specializes in analysing entertainment data ranging from the sales figures of video games to the rise in popularity of VTubers.
Freya (Ella Balinska) is brought before the court of the Tantas upon her arrival to Athia in Forspoken (2023), Square EnixAccording to the self-described “shareholder meeting enthusiast” (as written in their X profile page and machine translated via Google Translate), the shareholder Q&A portion of the meeting saw current Square Enix president Takashi Kiryu pressed on a number of hard topics, including whether the lack of new info on Dragon Quest XII contributed to recent losses, what their future sales targets looked like, and how they planned to protect their copyrighted works from being scraped for AI generation tools.
Among these topics was the company’s current relationship with Sweet Baby Inc., to which a shareholder reportedly asked, “I’m personally happy about the shift from quantity to quality. I hope good titles will come out in the future. I’m concerned about the Canadian consulting company ‘Sweet Baby Inc.’ Square Enix is listed as a client, but is there actually a transaction there? What kind of transaction is it? Will they continue to do so in the future?”
@michsuzu via XIn response, President Kiryu declined to answer the question directly, instead deflecting by assuring the shareholder of Square Enix’s own future.
“I would like to refrain from making specific comments about individual clients,” said Kiryu, per @Michsuzu. “As we shift from quantity to quality, providing content that is enjoyable and safe for our customers is also part of what makes a product fun. We will do our best as creators.”
From there, the shareholder meeting concluded with the passing of three new corporate proposals and the introduction of Square Enix’s new directors.
While “safe” could mean a game that is a ‘safe bet’ for investors, in this context it seems far more likely it means a game that does not offend any sociopolitical sensibilities.
Safe games are partly the reason Sweet Baby Inc.- and Square Enix efforts at DEI – have been so loathed. Rather than simply avoid offense surrounding a given subject, DEI demands that said subject instead be presented as particularly special, often unrealistically so.
Combine this sentiment with poor writing, and what usually results is characters and stories that feel like a soapbox, rather than entertainment.
And when the gameplay also turns out to be bad, as seen in the Sweet Baby Inc.-influenced Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, it can be hard not to imagine that the money and time spent by studios on the consultation studio’s efforts would have been better spent on improving the quality of their actual products.
Square Enix via X
Sadly, as players know, Square Enix has made a concerted effort in recent years to sand the edges off their various titles in order to boost their sales among Western audiences, the results have which include the censoring of Tifa Lockheart’s outfit in Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth, the addition of non-binary gender options to Harvestella, and the softening of slavery-related dialogue in Final Fantasy XVI.
Nonetheless, there are signs Square Enix isn’t entirely beholden to DEI. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth featured beachwear for Tifa and Aerith while joking about the male characters understandable reactions, and Mana Series Producer Masaru Oyamada in an April interview made clear his belief that it’s “best to deliver [a] game based on the developers’ creative vision.”
Andrea Rhodea (Trevor Devall) calls Cloud’s (Cody Christian) drag is “perfection” in Final Fantasy VII (2020), Square Enix
