My Brother. My Captain. My King.
I want to talk for a little bit about Final Fantasy XV.
I grew up with this franchise. I’ve played most of the games in the series. I’ve beaten about half of them. Final Fantasy XIV, the rebooted version, has 980 hours clocked in on my Steam library.
I’m a fan. I’m a veteran. I’ve loved this series of games since I was a kid.
So you can imagine, I think, how torturous the wait was for XV to come out. That painful, agonizing decade of waiting. To finally hear the release date last year, probably one of the only things that made 2016 tolerable, only to have it delayed.
I have never looked forward to a game like I looked forward to this one. I was so excited.
… If I were like a great number of people who played this game at launch, you might expect me to talk about how disappointing it was to see what this game became. You might expect me to talk about how much potential was lost. How it betrayed me. How we deserved better. But I’m not going to do that. One, I don’t agree with any of that. I think this game is wonderful. But more importantly. I cannot, in good conscience, add on to the criticism.
Because Final Fantasy XV gave me something, gave me someone, that no other game has ever given me.
I was born with Cerebral Palsy. I’m sure a lot of people following this blog of mine are aware of that. My case is minor, in the grand scheme of things. I have what’s called spastic diplegia. What this means, in simple terms, is that my muscles don’t quite work the way they’re supposed to. My left side is substantially weaker than my right, particularly my legs. I don’t have hip sockets. I do have scoliosis, though. My balance is shot, I have the knees of an old man. I use a cane for long distances, crutches for longer distances, and a wheelchair when neither of those options work anymore.
I didn’t grow up with heroes to look up to. I didn’t have anyone who shared my struggles on TV, or in my games. No movies, no cartoons, no books. Cerebral Palsy was something I talked about with my doctors, and my therapists, and my family. That’s it.
I didn’t get to see somebody like me be the hero. I didn’t get to feel like I could save the world. I grew up feeling alone, even though I was surrounded by people who loved me and supported me, because who understood me?
In a lot of the promotional material for Final Fantasy XV, the Brotherhood anime, the Kingsglaive movie, even flashbacks in the main game, you see young Noctis, the game’s protagonist, in a wheelchair.
And in the game proper, when Noctis is grown up and going on his journey, if you pay close attention to how he runs, you might notice that he favors one leg over the other. This is particularly noticeable if you run him out of stamina and he has to stop to catch his breath. One of his outfits even sports a knee brace.
Noctis Lucis Caelum, the main character of a numbered Final Fantasy game, has a permanent injury. A permanent disability.
Does he have Cerebral Palsy? No. Is it particularly noticeable? Not unless you’re paying attention. Was it even deliberate? I have no idea. But considering my options, I honestly don’t care.
Noctis is a hero with a disability. Noctis is setting out to save his home, to reclaim his throne … with a disability. Finally, after 30 years on this earth, I can look at someone in one of these games, in one of my favorite franchises of all time, and say:
“I know what that feels like.”
Finally, I can look at the main fucking character of a videogame and see myself.
I do not, and never will, have the words for how much that means to me. How long I have been waiting for something, anything, like this.
Is Final Fantasy XV perfect? No. It has its flaws. And for plenty of people, those flaws are deal-breakers. I don’t dispute that. I will never silence anyone for that. But … but this game. This game made me cry. This game filled a void. This game healed a wound I didn’t even know I had.
Thank you, Square Enix. Thank you, Hajime Tabata. Thank you, Tetsuya Nomura. Thank you, Takuma Harada. Thank you, Tatsuhisa Suzuki. Thank you, Ray Chase.
Thank you, Noctis Lucis Caelum.
My God. Thank you so much.
