Final Fantasy 1 - Probably the mostly neutral of the series

Since the topic has been brought up from a friend of mine about Final Fantasy and how sex sells. let's break down some of the gender issues regarding each series and yes, I have played all but FF9 and the online series since I don't agree with paying a monthly subscription. I do love this series so don't get me wrong here. This has become a real issue in games as most women have pointed out. Ultimately this is also why I have always chosen to be the male character in many games. If I wanted to see women in skimpy clothing, I would purchase a magazine. I want to know that no matter what the character I play is well protected and their armor makes sense. I understand this is also an issue with some male characters but it is more prominent with female characters in video games. When you think it isn't, there are mods and skins to make them appear as so.

I'm just going to dive into Final Fantasy for now as it's a series I do love quite a lot but have also found that, yes, it can be pretty sexist (Like a lot of games out there). Oh Japan, you silly country you.

I'm going to show each series and their different characters (most of them are non playable since Final Fantasy is, mostly, a 1 player game deal where you play as the game chosen protagonist and everyone else is background business)

I'll start with the mostly neutral, Original Final Fantasy (FF1).

This is a series based mostly on the different classes. Gender isn't really much of an issue since the classes are what they are. Final Fantasy 1 was released for the NES December 18th 1987 and didn't reach North America until 1990. Since then it has been remade for other systems since it's initial release.  It has been on the Nintendo Entertainment System, MSX2, WonderSwan Color, PlayStation, Game Boy Advance, NTT DoCoMo FOMA 901i, PlayStation Portable, Wii Virtual Console, J2ME Phones (released by Namco Games), iOS, Windows Phone. Like most of the games in this franchise it is a single player RPG that seemed to be inspired by the well known table top RPG, Dungeons & Dragons.
In this game you've got a few classes...

You've got:

The Warrior / Fighter

After completing the Citadel of Trials, Bahamut,
the Dragon King, upgrades the Warrior to the rank of Knight

In Dissidia and Dissidia Duodecim, The Warrior of Light is shown wearing all this:

Seems pretty hoaky. I'd play this character. He looks like he's ready for combat.

The Thief

Kind of reminds you of Link in a way.

After completing the Citadel of Trials, Bahamut,
the Dragon King, upgrades the Thief to the rank of Ninja

The Monk

After completing the Citadel of Trials, Bahamut the Dragon King upgrades him to the rank of Master

The White Mage

PSP Version

After completing the Citadel of Trials, the White Mage becomes the White Wizard

The thing is, with The White Mage, I can tell she's a girl because I see boobs in the PSP version since Square Enix was so nice to tighten her robes (There are few male White Mages in the FF series). Does the poor White Mage need to wear less then robes to attract an audience? I certainly don't think so. I think robes are fine. They need a way to feel comfortable. They have a very important job. Without them the party would certainly suffer.

Black Mage

After completing the Citadel of Trials, Bahamut, the Dragon King, 

upgrades the Black Mage to the rank of Black Wizard 

I'm still pretty certain that Lulu from FFX is a Black Mage (considering her spells) but that's just a personal assumption since her sphere grid was mostly made up of strong black mage spells. (I'll get into FFX later)

Red Mage

After an event in the game in which the party must retrieve a Rat Tail

from the Citadel of Trials and return it to Bahamut, the
Red Mage is upgraded to the Red Wizard

I think this class was brought out again on a male light elf character from Final Fantasy XI but I will delve into that when I get to that series in a bit. It does look like he's fully clothed though, right? Though you could say it could be male or female or just a really good looking male character. That's the beauty of these games though, isn't it? Using your imagination and building a character to fit the inner you. Throwing yourself into the game as if you were playing D&D with a group of friends. That's the beauty of the 8 bit characters. The graphics, the ideas. This is what really got me into playing them, the use of my imagination was important. The female characters didn't have to dress in less then what they had unless I wanted them to (and I never did)

With this game there were also different races 

(which I really enjoyed learning about during a replay of this game, I just wish I had the choice of playing a character UNDER any of these races... kind of like FFXI only not an MMORPG that you pay a monthly subscription for. I mean something like Phantasy Star Online character creation where you can be dark, light, human, elf, random race, tall, short, deep voiced, high pitched, whatever. All of that. I want that.)

Dark Elf - Dwarf - Elf - Lufenian - Mermaid

Next up... Final Fantasy 2. The start of characters with actual names