Returning To Being a Boy Of Summer
A journey of thoughts on the hottest of messes that is Final Fantasy XV and what it could have been
I am currently sitting at my desk at The Games Institute about an hour after wrapping the recording of First Person Scholar’s Final Fantasy XV Podcast. In about an hour we attempted to, four of us, run through the gambit of everything we felt, and thought about this game, but as is the brand, it was only the beginning. My brain won’t stop spinning and twirling with thoughts, opinions, and feelings. A misty vortex like the reflection of a crystal filled with uncertainty and confusion. Full disclosure, I loved and adored this hot mess of a game: both in spite of, and because of its glaring flaws and hegemonic missteps. I find myself slightly troubled by this. As a non-binary human being, I shouldn’t want to wade around in the hegemonic masculinity that for so long held me in its tight, sweaty, unwanted embrace. But honestly, there is a lot of me that was and does rejoice in Gladdio insinuating that my penis is small because of the size of the fish I just caught and whatever other aggressions the four boys of summer wish to dish out. Let’s examine why.
(Important note: this was written before any of the recent story updates and before the DLC was released)
The ice broke and I submerged fully into the hype train. I was going to be a brooding boy of summer in all black, and I was SO excited.
Boarding The Hype Train
I’ve been interested in Final Fantasy XV as far back as when it was first announced as Final Fantasy Versus XIII and was shaping up to be some Romeo and Juliette story — but one where they agree with their families about the other maybe needing to die. Alas that wasn’t the game that we got. A lot happened between the first 2006 trailer and its eventual winter 2016 release.
A year or so shy of the release, a good friend of mine did a good online thing. I had already begun to be swayed back to the hype train by Final Fantasy XV Episode Duscae, but the mixture of The Atari’s cover of Boys of Summer with the latest trailer was a tipping point. The ice broke and instead of icy waters below, I found the posh leather bound seats of the hype train below. I was going to be a brooding boy of summer in all black, and I was SO excited.
I’m the type that tries very hard to NOT read about games I’m excited for until after the release. It only takes one or two things for me to quickly get overly excited about a game. This has happened time and again to both disappointment and satisfaction (I told you it doesn’t take much).
Having been thoroughly persuaded by my friend accidentally, I couldn’t help but seek out that precious crack: written words to confirm my hype. I read this lovely piece on FemHype about both the hope and dreams of a better male representation to be found within the game first, and it felt like a reifying royal decree: you can be feminist and hype for this game. I got vocal about my hype, very vocal, and definitely to the dismay of some of my friends patiently waiting for the hype train to leave the station so that they could politely wave goodbye.
In the final weeks leading up to Final Fantasy XV’s long dreamt of release, all I could talk about was how much I loved the Episode Duscae and Platinum Demo. I was full on obsessed. Fingers eager for more of that sweetly satisfying combat, and even flashes of the emotional depth packed into the anime prequel. Of course, seeing my thoughts essentially repeated, my hope made material by the always excellent writer Alexa Ray Corriea, it only further fueled the fires of my hype train, full steam ahead. I wanted these “Choco-Bros”, I needed this adventure with my new boys of summer, for it was winter and as we all know, a very cold one indeed.
Anxious about representation, but swayed by game-play and an ideal, I dived in without trepidation.
Getting the Game, Playing the Disappointment
I’ve written at length about my luck and frustration with Amazon. This all started with my collector’s edition of Final Fantasy XV not arriving at my doorstep, or arriving and promptly being stolen while I was on campus teaching. During the first few days after the game’s release, while I looked for a replacement copy, I held bated breath; all the while constantly on the phone listening to one of my best friends talk about his own adventures with these already infamous boys of summer. It was infuriating. I had been having a hard term, and I just wanted to escape. While listening to my best friend’s steady love ballad for the game, I read the mixed reviews and only got more excited. I describe these as mixed as they do highlight some of the bad of the game despite mostly giving positive appraisals. Finally after a flourish of emails between Amazon and I, then a few days spent waiting anxiously for my refund, and then the agonizing hell of committing myself to finishing grading final term papers. it was time to play my long awaited fantasy (for fans and first timers… I guess? Seriously, this was such a weird tagline, marketing team, whhhyy?).
I still remember the final agonizing seconds of anticipation as the last install procedure of Final Fantasy XV stood between me and its wide expansive countryside to explore. In a lot of ways I had been waiting 10 years for this even if the game had left my radar. Anxious about representation, but swayed by game-play and an ideal, I dived in without trepidation.
We had a band of brothers who had to fight things and keep each other alive. In the process, they fit their different prepackaged sexy boy roles.
My first play session was several hours long. Enraptured by the lush visuals and the game’s slow, careful opening moments from leaving Insomnia, to pushing the Regalia along the highway, to meeting Cindy, and exploring the wilderness around her garage, I found it all just so magical. It was the game I hoped right away, yes there were already problems (just imagining hot oil dripping down from the regalia’s undercarriage onto Cindy’s skin makes my skin crawl), but everyone was fun and light hearted: they were in great spirits so I had to follow suit. I ended up passing out, controller in hand, glasses sliding off my face a-skewed as I half hung from the side of my bed that first winter night.
Combat quickly showed a surprising depth for its simplicity, if ultimately a bit easy. I found my mind drifting back to middle school as the boys fought massive beasts together, cracking wise, and watching each other’s backs. Everything was high octane, but mixed generously with a seemingly earnest concern oft seen as the romanticized aspect of military service. We had a band of brothers who had to fight things and keep each other alive. In the process, they fit their different prepackaged sexy boy roles. Glasses, motherly: check. Bouncy, cute: check. Big, emotionally distant: CHECK. Moody, disinterested: check. The gay sports anime fan in me was ecstatic.
I dug into Final Fantasy XV with such great fervor. It only took me a couple weeks to dump eighty hours into the game and complete its story. I plan to return and play it again when all story updates are complete. Playing the game really did feel like going on a road trip with friends. The story was at many times nonsensical, and very reliant on characterization, as well as development that happened in the companion anime Brotherhood. Beyond that, even the slightest semblance of understanding of the greater conflicts could only be gleamed from promotional movie Kingsglave. Who were we fighting? What was actually so special about Noctis? These story threads were picked up at first but quickly dropped to focus on what the game truly shined at, showing the 4 Choco-Bros play off one another. Emote, mostly in the generic shounen anime style, but still, express earnest moments of doubt, frustration, and confusion.
On the podcast, the others brought up this heart wrenching scene with Prompto.
I never experienced it. It was a secret conversation you could only ever catch if you stayed at the right motel at the right time. This was the ideal of Final Fantasy XV and it at its emotionally strongest. I’m glad it’s in the game. Perhaps the strongest reason I feel comfortable calling it a “hot mess” instead of just a “mess”. I find myself frustrated though. It felt like the game was hiding its true self behind seemingly random exploration with little to no clues to indicate when or where to find these bits of story. How many of these scenes have I missed out on? How many has everyone missed out on? Much like my frustration of not learning about the spectrum of gender in high school, I feel very cheated on this.
It’s no rumour that Final Fantasy XV’s ending is in shambles. Maybe it’s the trash connoisseur in me, maybe it’s the bonds I’ve made with Noctis, Ignis, Prompto, and Gladdio at this point, but I honestly loved it.
Throughout the game — especially within its oft critiqued final chapters, these moments of earnest love — love never fully declared — pop up over and over again. Each time I found my waterworks flowing as I felt sad with these characters. There was a strong, tacit familiarity to all of this. Playing this game, diving into the headbutts and the almost “I love you”’s was returning to middle school. It was “not hugging your friends good bye because you’re a boy”. It was “after school trampoline wrestling leagues where you created nonsensical stories that mixed equal parts WWE and anime”. And in its quieter moments, cutscenes like this one with Prompto, or the myriad of cutscenes between the boys in its final chapter, playing Final Fantasy XV in these moments was staying up way too late, expressing open honest feelings as you lay on a bed separated by a wall of pillows, wanting to snuggle with both words and body, but settling for long philosophizing about the world, the future, the past, and the empirically best pie.
For me, Final Fantasy XV at its core encapsulated the real friendships I developed as a child. It painted an honest picture of the hegemonic masculinity I grew up in. Yes, it is wadded up in traditional displays of “being a man””, but it earnestly tries to have its cake and eat it too. It tries to show how these boys, these men, how they can put down the sword and bear their chests to outline their heart.
So… what’s the take away?
Moving beyond Intention — the takeaway at Final Fantasy XV’s hype train’s last station
Full Spoilers beyond here
It’s no rumour that Final Fantasy XV’s ending is in shambles. Maybe it’s the trash connoisseur in me, maybe it’s the bonds I’ve made with Noctis, Ignis, Prompto, and Gladdio at this point, but I honestly loved it. It was nonsensical, but it had heart. Sneaking through the base alone with the ring of power, finally and fully accepting your destiny as King was very powerful to me. While I found the game’s pace was crawling in that much maligned thirteenth chapter (what is it with Square and the number 13 being so unlucky?), I nonetheless loved the dis-empowerment and re-contextualization the game applies to its protagonist and gameplay in this moment.
Your identity — most of your skills have been centered around working together with the other members of your party. Alone, looking for one member you’ve pushed away (literally), afraid everyone is dead, you push on with the purpose of a King ready to save the world and “reclaim your throne” (seriously, this is a much better tagline than for fans and first-timers).
Up to this point, despite all the political rigmarole surrounding Noctis and friends, the grandiose purpose of avenging Noctis’ father, despite all the plot, the game was very much so about these four, just… being together. Like all good roadtrips, it centers the story about the journey, not the destination. Once you finally board a ship and go off to Altissia, one story ends, and another is railroaded in. Literally.
So you get on the rail road, you lose your friends, you find your friends, you leave your friends to become one with the kings of the past by sleeping in a cave watched over by some god-like dragon thing that goes by Bahamut, you meet back up with your friends 10 years later, you go save the world, while you (dying in the process) finish off the final boss, your friends protect the gates from monsters(they don’t die, the remaining three Choco-Bros lived, if you disagree about this, don’t @ me about it — Seriously, don’t.).
I think Final Fantasy XV wants to say that stoic hegemonic masculinity isolates you and will eventually kill you. Having lived as a gender queer person in a seemingly hyper masculine body for many years, this was a sentiment I agreed with wholeheartedly.
Motherly Ignis, anxious Prompto, even big guy Gladdio have moments that show his emotions fully. As Noctis you have opportunities to embrace or reject others emotional depth, but the prince remains distant. The future, and then too soon king, seemingly incapable of raw transparency. Yes, Noctis cries, but he doesn’t share his thoughts and feelings with words, the others very much so do. Each one has different difficulty opening up, but they do, Noctis ultimately is alone emotionally. He has desires and passions, but his true feelings are simple, un-complex. He’s part of a dying breed (in this case, the Kings of Lucis).
I often seen Noctis’ inability to, even in the end, say “I love you” to his friends framed as a shortcoming of Final Fantasy XV and its thematic impact. I can’t deny that. That final scene around the campfire where the party is shown, now that the game is over, that intimate insight to the final words exchanged between the boys of summer before they finally deliver a “cure for Insomnia” would have been so much stronger if he had of just said those three little words. Now I want to make this clear, this is my interpretation, and I don’t intend to claim this was Tabata-san, or Nomura-san’s intent with the end of the story. But what if we take that shortcoming and center it just as a shortcoming of Noctis?
Chronologically the last thing Noctis tells the Choco-Bros is to walk tall — much like his father told him on the onset of his own journey. Here we see him attempting, best as he can, to mimic the only example of love he has. Much in the same way I attempted to strongly emulate my father growing up. It was Noctis setting his brothers in arms free from their service to him. It was him allowing them to truly choose their own destiny now. While he’s away having a 10 year long conversation within the mind, the boys of summer don’t spend much time together unless they have to in the now eternal night. Most likely, all three Choco-Bros feeling like they let Noctis down are incapable of seeing one another without being overcome with guilt. As a result, they choose to remain separated. In much the same way, feeling like I would be weakening my usefulness for equality, I refused to consider that I might be queer.
Even the lore of the game centers a breaking from the hegemonic masculinity. It is important that King Noctis’ proximity to the Oracle Luna is centered as the core of his strength. Normally, power to rule is centered in one’s ability to lead warriors on a battlefield. But here, it is a connection to a woman whose job it is to communicate that is centered as the source of the king’s ability to grow stronger, not to be surrounded by other strong combatants. In much the same way, it was by surrounding myself with other queer people that I could grow to more fully accept myself, and express who I am. But as we know, Final Fantasy XV fridges Luna for Noctis’ “righteous man pain”, because the safety of the entire world isn’t apparently a good enough motivation for our protagonist, his fiance also needs to die. Still, it offsets him from the Oracle, and his ability to “grow stronger”.
Lose the ability to commune with the world, lose the ability to truly grow strong. While this isn’t reflected in the mechanics, there is one key aspect in the portrayal of our brooding King narratively that resonates with this line of thought.
I’ll be the first to admit that I considered Noctis to have grown the least of the Choco-Bros, if at all. Despite (surprisingly) loving Noctis, I’ve always preferred Sora’s joyful optimism over Riku’s troubled agent of darkness shtick, which Noctis has in spades. A man perhaps destined to not grow without a woman by his side is a very grim perspective on card and parcel masculinity (which yes, there is many problematic elements to the idea of a woman being necessary for a man’s emotional growth).
Noctis is a man who dies to end a bygone era, sending off a trinity of masculine to effeminate person’s, who all identify as a man. People who, like me, have felt trapped by what it means in their world to be a man. Even Gladdio didn’t want to be a king’s body guard. Sure, you can ascribe this exclusively to his claim that Noctis just wasn’t manly enough for him, but a proper man shouldn’t care about that in hegemonic masculinity's eyes. A proper man should just follow his duty and not complain. Gladdio decidedly doesn’t do that. Gladdio is a man who didn’t want to be hegemonic, but now is trapped in a long history of its affects. However, the end of the game, Noct’s death, his final act of love sets these three free from their chains.
This freeing from masculinity, from being cis, is not unlike my own freedom from it. Though it was a long slow process ( and it may very well be a long slow process for these boys too) leaving my home town helped me come to terms with who I am and that it’s okay that I am that way. Much like how the boys have lost a loved one, they have also lost their one purpose that has kept them fighting the last ten years before the game’s climax. With the world’s return to a relative sense of peace, monsters removed from their lives, they need to forge new identities. They need to board identities not rooted in the service of an now defunct royal family. Much like how moving away for University forced me to contextualize myself with agency over my own story, Noct’s death returns the agency over Prompto, Gladdio, and Ignis’ life to them, and only them. The eternal night ends and these men are boys of summer once more, but this time, it’s up to them, not the world around them to define what that boyhood takes shape as.
Next week. Let's talk about the DLC.
