Final Fantasy XVI is so fucking edgy

theverge.com:

By Andrew Webster, an entertainment editor covering streaming, virtual worlds, and every single Pokémon video game. Andrew joined The Verge in 2012, writing over 4,000 stories.

It’s no secret that Game of Thrones has been a major influence on Final Fantasy XVI — the developers have said as much. “When we first started creating the game, we had our core team of about 30 members very early on buy the Blu-ray boxset of Game of Thrones and required everyone to watch it, because we wanted this type of feel,” producer Naoki Yoshida told Eurogamer earlier this year.

And man, does it show.

The first few hours of the roleplaying game feel designed to show you just how edgy Final Fantasy can be. The previous entry was a wholesome road trip about friendship, told through things like photography and cooking. This game goes in a completely different direction. Characters have sex on-screen (though it never gets all that explicit), battles are Red Wedding-level gruesome (they definitely get explicit), and everybody swears… a lot.

This isn’t entirely new — Aerith said “shit” in Final Fantasy VII Remake, and it was pretty weird — but the sheer amount of cursing in FFXVI is unheard of for the series. Characters throw around fucks constantly, whether they’re running away from danger or being attacked by a beast. The level of cursing is no different than, say, an HBO series, and at times the game can feel like God of War or The Witcher. (Clive, FFXVI’s protagonist, even sounds a bit like Geralt, and has a giant dog like Jon Snow.) But even if the tone is common in modern fantasy, it’s still jarring for Final Fantasy.

It’s hard to really pinpoint what makes a Final Fantasy game a Final Fantasy game given that the series reinvents itself