i was just responding to the "no wonder the party was all dudes" comment
as far as i remember, the only characters who existed from the original nomura build of the game who were kept were Noctis and Lunafreya. characters in the original party from the early test shots eventually became the rest of the four man band, but there were women in that shot, too. it's possible those female characters from that initial group shot were never going to be in the final party (one of them almost certainly became iris later on) but the four man band was still a decision that can be attributed to tabata.
the game was a commercial success and there was no need to expand on it further (from a business standpoint)
ffxv was a loss, and no amount of sales it would have had would have recouped the bloated development and marketing budget that came from its absurd development cycle. now this is decidedly not tabata's fault, his job was to get the project finished since by that point it was already over budget and impossibly delayed, but it absolutely was imperative to square to continue monetizing the game even after the initial release or it never would have recouped their loss on it. for the record, despite all the monetization, it still didn't. see also; tomb raider.
square posted 30+ million dollar loss, recently, if you want to know just how badly they needed to continue monetizing ffxv.
Re: ayrt
as far as i remember, the only characters who existed from the original nomura build of the game who were kept were Noctis and Lunafreya. characters in the original party from the early test shots eventually became the rest of the four man band, but there were women in that shot, too. it's possible those female characters from that initial group shot were never going to be in the final party (one of them almost certainly became iris later on) but the four man band was still a decision that can be attributed to tabata.
ffxv was a loss, and no amount of sales it would have had would have recouped the bloated development and marketing budget that came from its absurd development cycle. now this is decidedly not tabata's fault, his job was to get the project finished since by that point it was already over budget and impossibly delayed, but it absolutely was imperative to square to continue monetizing the game even after the initial release or it never would have recouped their loss on it. for the record, despite all the monetization, it still didn't. see also; tomb raider.
square posted 30+ million dollar loss, recently, if you want to know just how badly they needed to continue monetizing ffxv.