I really enjoyed the Final Fantasy 16 demo and I'm looking forward to the rest of the game but also it's hilarious to me that they have openly said they wrote it while watching Game of Thrones because if they hadn't said it, it still would've been incredibly obvious. Here are all the things I can think of off the top of my head, two days later (full spoilers from the FF16 demo ahead)
- Immediately, a group of characters called "the bastards"
- A secret illicit romance where they talk in animal metaphors and the woman calls the man her lion
- They say "fuck" and "cock" in the first five minutes
- Clive has a dog who they say will grow up to be big and strong (it's in the flashback but I assume we'll see a big and strong Torgal)
- The heir to the Protagonist House has massive death flags all over him
- The head of the Protagonist House has massive death flags all over him
- Clive is extremely Jon Snow, can't be the heir so his nice dad trains him to be a warrior while his mean mom finds him disgusting and wishes he was never born (Catelyn Stark is good, fuck the haters)
- Jill is literally Theon, the "barbaric" Northern tribes kept raiding the "noble and good" Rosaria until the Archduke defeated them once and for all and took their leader's child as a ward (hostage) who ended up becoming like a sibling to his children
- Knights with names like Tyler and Wade
- Magical bird with a magical eye in its forehead
- Everyone dies
Now, if you know me then you know I've been a Game of Thrones hater since before it was cool. I'm hoping that FF16 will approach this subject matter thoughtfully and with nuance where Game of Thrones did not!
The stuff with the goblins was interesting because they clearly framed it (to me, the player, through the ATL screen) as non-human people fleeing from some danger and then the humans murdered them for taking refuge in an abandoned swamp town. The human characters of course didn't see it that way and killed them without a second thought. Will that come up again? No idea! But I'd love it if this game got us thinking about that stuff. My gears are turning already