Home

 › 

Articles

 › 

Why I’m OK with Final Fantasy XV’s Bro-Tastic Cast

Why I’m OK with Final Fantasy XV’s Bro-Tastic Cast

When Final Fantasy XV emerged from hibernation at the Tokyo Game Show last week, we saw a game that not everybody might expect from the series. It’s a road trip in a fancy convertible starring a group of young male friends. There’s not a woman to be seen, and the game’s developers have confirmed that there will not be any female party members in the game.

Now, I’m all for representation in video games. I become annoyed when RPGs feature a customizable main character, but leave out the option to play as a woman. It makes me sad when military games don’t feature any female soldiers. I get angry when game after game features women in only passive, victimized, or love interest roles.

Final Fantasy XV ‘s bro-tastic cast, however? It doesn’t bother me for two major reasons. First, the game is an intentional exploration of male friendship, something that isn’t always taken seriously in video games. Second, this is a single game in a series that has featured many diverse female characters over the years.

It was easy to see that Final Fantasy XV was about friendship between men even before the developers explicitly stated it as a major theme for the game. Early images of the main cast looked an awful lot like an iconic image of the cast of Ocean’s Eleven , a great flick with a prominent focus on brotherhood (albeit a brotherhood of thieves). The latest trailers show that the game is a road trip featuring the exiled prince Noctis and his best friends. I think that’s kind of brilliant—road movies are always popular, but the last road trip video game I can think of is 1993’s Sam & Max Hit the Road .

Many games leave women out of the main cast thoughtlessly, but in this case it’s an intentional decision in the name of focusing on same-sex friendship. While the game industry, like most other entertainment industries, has a lot of work to do in order to reflect the fact that women are half the world’s population, there’s certainly still room for a game that has thoughtfully decided to focus on a group of men.

Why I’m OK with Final Fantasy XV’s Bro-Tastic Cast

That decision in this case is helped by the fact that Final Fantasy as a series has nearly always had a strong female representation in its casts. Looking mostly at the modern era, Final Fantasy IX’s Garnet, Final Fantasy X ‘s Yuna, and Final Fantasy XII ‘s Ashe are all strong-willed young women with important personal goals. The two Final Fantasy MMORPGs feature female leaders throughout their casts of NPCs. In Final Fantasy XIII , Lightning’s quest to save her sister Serah and the strong bond of friendship between (female warriors) Fang and Vanille are two of the major driving forces behind the game’s plot. There’s even the RPG world’s answer to Spice World , the delightfully campy all-female Final Fantasy X-2 .

Would I say that Final Fantasy ‘s portrayal of female characters is perfect? Certainly not, but it has been improving over the years, and Square Enix is miles ahead of most other Japanese developers when it comes to representation and the positive portrayal of women in its games. I don’t think we can accuse the company of neglecting to represent women when it releases a single game without a woman in the main cast.

Thus, I say, let’s let the boys have their day in Final Fantasy XV . I’m interested in seeing if the game’s developers can manage to make this group of buddies complex and interesting, or if they’ll fall into the trap of creating a group of emotionally stunted man-children who fail to see significant development over the course of the game. I’m crossing my fingers for the former, and am looking forward to taking a road trip with Noctis and his bros.

To top