Final Fantasy 14's Japanese age rating gets a bump, and it's all because of screenshots

Final Fantasy 14's had its age rating in Japan increased—and it might be because people can't stop taking sexy pictures of their catgirls.

Alright, that's not literally the reason, but it's potentially a root cause. In a recent blog post, Square Enix explained that the long-standing MMO would be increasing its age rating—which is called CERO in Japan—from CERO C to CERO D.

Per the official CERO website, D is the rating given to 17 year olds and above. While the following quote from Square's blog post is machine-translated, the cause for this age bump is pretty unambiguous; "Currently, the 'CERO C' rating necessitates restrictions on the Group Pose function. Therefore, to maintain the freedom of Group Pose and avoid these restrictions, we have decided to change the rating to 'CERO D'."

Group Pose (Gpose) is the game's screenshot functionality which, as a grim consequence of being on the internet for more than five minutes, I am wildly aware is often used by players to take salacious pictures of their characters.

Sometimes, these pictures are well within reason—Final Fantasy 14 is, after all, a game flooded with conventionally attractive adventurers and an extensive glamour system. Other times, players use mods (which are banned by the terms of service) to make things that are unambiguously not safe for work.

It's not certain if the latter, rather than the former, is responsible, but it does make me a bit nervous for the game's modding community. Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) was forced late last year to have a stern, honest conversation with the game's playerbase over mod usage, after shutting down a popular mod drew ire.

As a matter of fact, Yoshi-P said, word-for-word, that if players post screenshots "of their naked character publicly on social media, FFXIV itself may be subject to legal measures by regulators in certain countries".

Given no updates have been issued to the Gpose system itself (or at least, none that would increase the suggestiveness of screenshots you can take with it), I do have to wonder out loud if the modding community might've caused this.

That's not to say the rating isn't "appropriate" based on CERO's past actions—here's an interview from 2012 (via "Thoughts about Making the Video Games 2") wherein Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai complains that: "We had Palutena wearing shorts and made the inside of Wonder Pink’s skirt too dark to see anything.

"Nevertheless, CERO told us the designs were 'sexually provocative.' They were being ridiculous and frankly quite juvenile." In other words, applying this same harshness to FF14 isn't out of character—it's just strange that it took them so long. Gpose functionality has, after all, been in the game since 2015 in patch 3.1. Either CERO dragged their feet, or someone took a wrong turn on X.