Character Genders - do you, as a player, care?

[Onomotopoeia]

(and if you're selecting up to hundreds of them in later parts of the game, a way to just select randomly rather than manually picking lol)

Selecting dozens or even hundreds of characters might have its own problems for an RPG, either in the time spent organizing such a feat or in the cumulative memory-requirements to manage that many events. I've never really considered that someone would want to be picking quite so many characters....
In this particular instance, you could "infer" a level of abstraction, such as for squad-based roleplay and tactical-battlers; instead of even requiring so many random NPC, each NPC would be the equivalent of a squad (or troop, even).


This reminded me of, in Suikoden II, how for the army battles, you would have up to three of your recruited characters as one unit on the map. I'm sure that you can find a Youtube video or two of Let's Plays where this level of abstraction is used...