It's one thing to naturally write characters into a story, that happens to have darker skin tones, than it is to force a character to be written around said skin tones, as it tokenizes them. Same thing happens in Hollywood these days. They are so worried about making those that cry out for diversity in film happy, that they never stop to think about how the character is written, or how that writing makes the actor portraying the character feel. The people that want diversity the most, rarely actually care about the characters they asked for, be it the depth of the characters backstory, or personality, and just want representation for representation sake. It makes the character an empty shell, a husk devoid of any real character, and you wind up with something less than what you would have had with a character that was written by someone with the sole intention of telling a good story.
The same can be said of writing a character for the sake of inclusion, based solely around gender identity, or sexual orientation, as it lowers the overall quality of character. In real life for instance, are we not more than the sum of our parts, the color of our skin, or what we find sexually attractive. Why should we define ourselves based around something so trivial, and so meaningless? Instead the character of our being should be how we treat others, and how we act in the darkest of situations. But instead society seems Hell bent on locking people into saying I'm this, or I'm that, which has only ever divided us, instead of simply calling ourselves human.
By extension, the characters we write now, are less about telling a story about how a man or woman, sacrificed everything so that others could survive total destruction, or a story about how someone using their intellect made a better future for their children, has now devolved into identity and gender politics, with the sole intention of focusing on our differences, rather than our similarities. Given PSO2 seems to me at least, a story about very different people, putting aside those differences to stop a great number of evils, I feel like a developer should only ever add in a character, of a darker skin tone, based from a writing standpoint, rather than forced diversity, as it would feel less sincere otherwise.
That all said, a player can choose to represent themselves, or whatever they happen to feel like being at that time, given the option to be a living cyborg. As such, I don't agree with the overall idea of forced diversity in a game, simply because someone asked for it. The diversity needs to come naturally from the writing, and character design. It should be something the designer is passionate about, because then you would have diversity, and a quality character.
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