Bringing Fantasy to Life in Final Fantasy XV

Welcome to bringing fantasy to life in Final Fantasy XV. If you're looking for bringing hell to life, you're in the wrong room. That's in 202. I'm not even making that up. That's going on right now. So, uh my name is Dan Inoue. Uh I'll give you a quick background on me. I was born and raised in New York, and I bounced back and forth to Japan for a while before landing at Square Enix about 12 years ago. And for the last couple years, I've been leading the team responsible for the English language content in Final Fantasy XV and its companion projects. I'll warn you up front that there are spoilers ahead, but there's also a section on why the spoilers don't really spoil anything. So, uh I hope you'll stick with me, and we'll start with Final Fantasy. So, I'm guessing everyone here kind of has an idea uh and has heard of Final Fantasy, but what is it? For 30 years, Final Fantasy has reinvented itself and rebuilt itself anew with each iteration. So, every time it's new characters, new

worlds, new gameplay, new combat, often fabulous hair, but it's never the same game. So, what defines a Final Fantasy game? Well, one answer is it's lore. Uh more precisely, the way the lore of each entry uh kind of co-opts monsters and magic and mythos from different traditions. You have the Babylonian next to the Celtic next to the Chinese next to Greek mythology uh without any regard for the dogmatic baggage that comes with it. So, Final Fantasy kind of draws on these for inspiration without any limitations. And so, many, many years ago when this project began, uh it was built on a simple press a premise, a fantasy based on reality, which is a significant proposition because reality has never really been the series' focus. So, of course, all fiction is in some ex- to some extent based on reality. Uh on the surface, the intent here was a modern take, sort of a real world setting with touches of high fantasy. But in time, with the companion projects and promotion, it added an extra

dimension of reality, and the project kind of developed a life of its own. So, at the core of everything is the game, which follows uh Prince Noctis and his three close friends as they leave home on a journey. It begins with an open world exploration of the continent, and then gradually assumes a linear format as the story progresses. The film Kingsglaive uh recounts the events that unfold in the Crown City as the prince is away, uh centering around his father the king, his paramour Luna, and the titular Kingsglaive, the defenders of the city. So, the film was released about a month uh sorry, a couple months ahead of the game's release uh in theaters, and the events of the film occur parallel to the first chapter of the game. The anime Brotherhood uh references the uh bond between the prince and his friends. So, as hinted at in the panels here, um the story opens with the with the gang on the road, and then tells itself uh

tells the story through flashbacks uh from their boyhood. So, the series began streaming on YouTube roughly a half year before the game's release with one episode each month in five installments. So, these weren't kind of thinly related spin-offs or throwaway side stories. Uh these were threads of a simultaneous narrative woven together across media. Uh we couldn't assume everyone in our audience had seen all the companion projects or even any for that matter. So, this represented a big challenge uh building integrated yet independent narratives and forming a coherent and cohesive reality. So, that's the intro, and with that in mind, here's the breakdown of this talk as told in three acts. Uh first, I'll start off by introducing some of the tactics and techniques we used to bring realism into our work. And in the second act, I'll discuss how realities of development and promotion got in the way of these plans. And

finally, we'll wrap it up with some observation about what it all means. Uh so, Act One is the best-laid plans. Uh so, on any project, our first task is to anchor our reality in our static material, our setting, our characters, and our lore. Uh Final Fantasy is a Japanese-developed franchise, uh but the reality basis meant it was more important than ever that we ask ourselves, "How would this be done in the West?" when making our linguistic choices. One thing that made this Final Fantasy different from others also was the fact that it was set to launch simultaneously in 12 languages. As there would be no lead time to perform the usual localization tweaks, uh it meant that the gro- the game had to be global from the ground up. So, just as the ecology and nature of the game borrowed from real-world sources, uh so would the cultures. So, the world of Eos uh features four distinct civilizations with their own architecture, lifestyles, and written

languages. Pictured here is Altissia, the Walls of Water. It's sort of a reimagined Venice, and in line with that flavor, our Italian translation team was called on to help in naming the locales and helping with the signage. Uh here we see a scene from the continent, which uses English as a base with sort of French and Gaelic-leaning uh spellings. Now, normally localizing art assets is unwise and a headache, uh and most fantasy games rightly opt to use iconography or illegible text. But uh one of the kind of benefits and luxuries of having a multi-cultural, multi-lingual in-house translation translation staff is that it let us review things early on so that we could globalize them. And incorporating this this sort of semi-real-world languages into the world helped build that road trip aesthetic and make the trip familiarly foreign for all audiences. And so, I have just a quick aside here, which is that I want to stress the importance of consulting native speakers uh when working with foreign cultures,

um especially when in real-world or real-world-based fictional settings, because especially when shows or games uh kind of they do the Japanese season and they use the Japanese setting, it's usually laughably inauthentic, and I realize that stories cater more to people's perceptions than they do necessarily realities, but it's 2017, and the internet will call you out. You will be exposed. So, be sure to ask a native speaker when you're working in another culture. So, next up, uh this also uh goes to that point on the divide between uh perception and reality. Um while we added plenty of uniform local color to the continent of Lucis, the English-speaking content, uh this wouldn't fit with the kind of modern metropolis of its capital, the Crown City. So, we have some cool concept art here, and the Crown City is a cultural amalgam. Uh our art team consciously intended to show it as street scenes from the world over. Uh so, you can see

bits of London, New York, Paris, and Tokyo, kind of depending on the angle you look at it from, to make it feel both familiar and foreign to a worldwide audience. And to give it that same kind of diversity linguistically, we employed accents according to social circle more than geographic origin, which gave it a more modern feel than the classic old dwarf or Scottish uh fantasy trope. Uh so, ultimately, I can't say definitively whether this enhanced or diminished the reality for the audience at large, but it did give us the freedom to assemble a really great transatlantic cast. Uh so, that was one plus of this uh decision as well. And so, the next aspect might strike you as a little too real. Uh the astute viewer may have noticed a fair amount of product placement in these shots. So, yeah. Uh some of you will find this jarring. Uh the lines between reality and fantasy become very blurry here, and the specter of commercialism looms kind of large over artistic merit. Uh but so, these

imports from beyond the fourth wall may be hard to explain away in canon, but they do make the world more kind of recognizable and familiar and more real uh to a good segment of the audience. And so, that's what I tell myself at night. Um when it came to hawking cup noodles in the game, we did it kind of tongue-in-cheek cuz we definitely wanted to respect our audience's intelligence, uh and we thought it was a playful tap on the fourth wall. So, uh hopefully, they enjoyed that. And moving on to characters, um so, relatable characters can make or break your reality. And so, yeah. I joked about it earlier, but identifying with spectacularly quaffed uh JRPG heroes can be a real barrier to entry for a lot of players. And the fancy-schmancy names don't always help. So, we rely on touchstones to kind of turn foreign tropes into more relatable people for our audience. And here's the core four for our main story. Uh on the far left is Ignis. He's the suave brains of the operation, sort

of James Bond in the great outdoors. Uh next to him is Prompto, the funny fast talker, uh kind of a zanier Ferris Bueller. On the far right is Gladio, who's a younger John McClane from Die Hard. Uh and I'll get to the rock star in the middle in a second, but who wouldn't want to take a road trip with James Bond, Ferris Bueller, and John McClane? So, writing with established reference character voices in mind isn't exactly a cutting-edge uh technique necessarily, uh but it's especially critical in a localization. Obviously, you tinker with the archetype, but it provides a compass that keeps your character directed for your audience uh through all the cultural clutter. And another key point here is that the analogs aren't sidekicks. Each one has his own brand of cool. Each can carry his own story. Each is the normal one in his own mind. And so, uh it really keeps the give-and-take fresh because they all feel they're the they're right. Uh and so, here's a little side story uh about Noctis' character. Um I always use scripted characters for my references

and I avoid using real people because real people you don't know them as well as you think you do necessarily. And so I just always prefer to use characters. So I knew who he wasn't. He wasn't going to be the whiny emo JRPG character. But whose voice was it? And I was actually talking to the Japanese voice actor for Noctis who one night told me that his inspiration was sort of Kurt Cobain who's kind of sweet at heart but always on edge and this rockstar who scorns the spotlight and it really clicked for me. It was kind of an epiphany. And so this is my one exception to my only using scripted character rules. And so if you have the opportunity to talk to your Japanese voice cast, it's a great place for ideas. Failing that, your English voice cast can give you a lot of input into the characters. And so yeah, if you do have voice actors, definitely use them. They they know their characters kind of as well as we writers do. Next up, so one bonus of having these independent backstories and flashbacks

is that it added persistence to the universe and to the characters. And so each story had its self-contained arc, but when you put them together, they formed these life arcs for the characters. And this this really added psychological depth to the characters. So if you go into the game alone, Noctis starts off as kind of a disenchanted youth who embarks on a journey to overcome sort of self-doubt. But when we see him as a kid, he's actually a really happy kid and we see the events that kind of cause him to become the disenchanted youth we meet later. But together, when you take his childhood story and the story we see in game, it forms this story of recovering lost innocence, which is kind of beautiful. And similarly with Prompto, there's some stories of his insecurity and brotherhood and that gets reprised in sort of a heart-to-heart conversation he has later. And so this is kind of that independent yet integrated at best. It's both stories stand on their own, but it gives

you kind of a deeper appreciation when they connect. And the last point is a little more technical. So Final Fantasy XV is a road trip where you spend a lot of time hanging out with your friends. And that feeling really needed to be immersive. So we devoted a lot of our energy to creating this conversational chemistry. Making the friendship feel real was kind of the heart of the player experience. And these are some of the formula we applied. This is very early, but early on we defined the interpersonal dynamics and kind of personalize them by equipping each with his fair share of nicknames for the others. We also kept little background speech ticks and idiosyncrasies for them like generally avoids contractions, never says he's sorry and that sort of thing. Establishing these kind of behind the scenes rules was really invaluable given that we had multiple writers working on the project and it was across media. So it was good to have these background rules that we could refer to.

We also used linguistic techniques to flesh them out. To bring home the kind of casual and comfortable feel of the characters, we try we tended to drop subjects whenever possible. And we also leaned on our voice actors for organic non-verbals, those little mumbles and quick clicks and squeaks that can be tricky to script. So along with breathing life into the characters, these tricks helped us hit our line timings because every line in the game had to match the Japanese timing precisely. So that was really invaluable for keeping it sounding natural. And then the last thing I have here is another technique we used to mimic real world speech that I call Sorkinization where each line picks up on or directly ties into the words of the line before, where you borrow a word to start a line or spit it back with a little twist or expand on a metaphor or kind of mimic the delivery. So picking up recently heard words is something natural to language that we all do kind of unconsciously and done in moderation, it can add

a natural feel to the dialogue. Of course if you overdo it, you get a little too much Sorkin in it, but uh but yeah, use in moderation would be my advice. And lastly for our plans, I wanted to talk about our plans for lore. So Final Fantasy developed an unfortunate reputation for kind of delving into the esoteric with its cosmology and for inundating players with unpronounceable proper nouns. So we wanted to we wanted to keep the lore rich. We wanted rich lore but needed to make it accessible. So we built an on-ramp here. And so we focused on the layman's kind of understanding of lore and made sure that we could couch it in easy-to-digest terminology. So we used terms like gods, demons, messengers, oracles, things that the average person on the street had heard of. Our summoned characters, which every Final Fantasy names differently, were called Astrals. So we we basically made sure that everybody

could be clear on the basic ground rules for lore. And then to prevent it from becoming too flat, we added in some flair in the forms of cryptonyms and kennings. So pictured here is the Astral Titan, who's also known as the God of Earth. And that's how most of the people of the world refer to him. But every now and then you'll hear you'll hear him called the Archaean or Land Forger for a more kind of eloquent style depending on the context and who's talking. So that was one way we kind of dolled up our lore. And one other mode I personally enjoyed working on was our surreality. And this is one example of some things we did to kind of bring home a surreal feel. So here we see Gentiana, a messenger who is in fact, spoilers the avatar of the ice goddess Shiva. I'm sorry if that spoiled it for you. Sorry. To keep her shrouded in mystery, we wrote her dialogue to not use you or I and it really created that sort of otherworldly detached feeling.

We kind of stole a page from Song of Ice and Fire, Game of Thrones, Jaqen H'ghar. That's kind of how he talks. But we did it in a little different way and it worked really well for her. So we kind of stretched it out to all our gods that they wouldn't use those direct subjects and it would give them kind of a detachment from humanity, which worked really well in monologues, but it made writing dialogue really really difficult because obviously the person they're interacting with has to understand it as well. And it took a lot of polishing to get right, but it was fun to do. So yeah, beyond the structure, the diction we used was also chosen to convey that eerie feeling that something beyond our understanding is happening. So using interpretive language in our god scenes and our dream sequences gave more weight to the words. So for instance, the Japanese might like literally state that the Astral gods have granted you their power which we rendered as the stars shine for you now, which accomplishes the goal of of the

point and allows for deeper interpretations and also kind of adds depth to our cosmology as well. So we really enjoyed using that sort of interpretive dialogue as a tool. So those are some pages on our playbook for establishing reality and surreality. And I realize that nothing I've described so far is particularly revolutionary or game-changing. Many of you have probably employed similar techniques in your own work. What inspired me to give this talk, however, was observing how some of these traditional tried and true tactics proceeded to backfire as the project progressed. So this act is in two parts covering the wacky adventures of production and the zany mishaps of promotion. So remember that bit I did on character chemistry and Sorkinization? That worked out fine for our cutscenes and set pieces. But as it turned out, some of our pieces weren't so set. And after we completed our recording for the Episode Duscae demo, we observed

something interesting. Part of our AI team's plan to maximize our voice assets had been to concatenate the lines. On the left here is the conversation metrics that they used and on the right was a snippet of the original linear studio script that we had submitted. And this wasn't a branching dialogue tree, but also not entirely random. The patterns were defined, but the same voice line could appear in very different mini conversations with different lines preceding or following and sometimes no lines. So after all the effort we'd put into making our character sound as humanly possible as human as humanly possible, the conversations started to kind of sound like robo calls. So making an interchangeable dialogue system work in text is hard enough. Set aside our lofty intentions of having the characters pick up on each other's lines. And simply making the subjects and predicates agree grammatically was going to be difficult. So to pass the Turing test, we established we worked with our

AI team and we established a couple ground rules. The first was to separate the lines that would launch a conversation for tonal difference. Secondly, we worked on mapping out the specs linguistically because Japanese doesn't use plurals and treat subjects differently. And lastly, we needed to be able to stretch any permutations that weren't working cuz you always need a kind of a safety clause. And our AI team was great about helping us with it. And it turned out really well. It was pretty organic. It was better than I expected. Our banter was actually really well received and some of it was scripted and some of it was this sort of organic concatenation. It really sounded like when you're on the road with your friends for too long and you just kind of uh your mind's in the distance. So it came across really authentic in that way. So as stated earlier, the Final Fantasy XV universe didn't feature spin-offs with only a few touch points. Everything was interwoven. So, with three separate production teams for game, film, and anime, you run into some

continuity issues. So, I'm not going to rip any of our minor stitches into plot holes right here. Uh but, we did make sure to cover all our logistics and details in the background at least. Hopefully. Uh so, while we managed to reconcile those details, there were kind of larger continuity concerns that grew as the universe was expanding. Namely, how does this all fit together? So, here you see dudes around a campfire, uh tense confrontation with royalty, an illustrated boy petting a dog, and a transforming flying car. How do these people talk to each other? It simply wasn't practical to have one overarching style that would apply to everything. So, if we couldn't have that, at least we needed to have contiguity, uh which is to say maintaining suspension of belief at the seams where a techno battle met the arcane or where high fantasy met casual banter. And we actually encountered one of these in the very first scene of our game as Regis, a character with a high fantasy tone as established in the film, is

sending off Noctis, aka Kurt Cobain. Uh we found this uh So, we I'm sorry. Uh we found the key to connecting their speech was to build off the emotional father and son dynamic and let the emotional content kind of supersede the stylistic. Uh we found this with other characters as well. When you draw on the relationship, it kind of uh overwrote whatever stylistic conventions you were trying to build beyond that. So, it kept the characters in the same scene and indirectly in the same world. And the last production test of time I have is pretty straightforward. Um for authenticity, we cast kids for our child roles and they turned in amazing performances. But, as our production schedule lagged on, we did get a little nervous. Uh just remember that your in-game kids will be young forever, but your voice actors will grow up and plan accordingly when you schedule.

So, this was the intricate space-time tapestry of our rollout. And you'll notice I've included trailers in here. Most of us would not consider PR as part of our story. Traditionally, the story is the part that is permanent, the thing that will be left decades after the dust is cleared. Uh promotion is an ephemeral phenomenon. It happens and then it dies. But, now more than ever games are also phenomena, you know, they are experiences to which context is integral. And they may have metas, they'll probably be patched, and they'll definitely be memed. So, nowadays games happen and that's true even for single-player games. So, we'll start at the beginning. Uh in the writing of any book, film, or game, there looms a spectre of those critical early questions we have to ask ourselves. So what? Who cares? And why does any of this matter? And more and more, audiences attempt to kind of answer these questions by over-analyzing trailers. So, uh

know. And so, one of the keys for us was to be nonchalant about our surprises and things so that the people who already saw it coming wouldn't feel too kind of taken there. It also helps to be conscious of things like making sure you name drop in dialogue more than you would normally and making sure any key plot points from other media would at least be available in ancillary text or interactive objects. Uh so, yeah, in Final Fantasy 15, we actually ended up with some kind of heavy-handed measures like uh announcing characters' names on screen and uh a montage from the film. Uh but, your mileage is your mileage may vary. Um we also had to be mindful of not overselling our reveals uh because you don't want to rub in the dissonance that the player knows something that the

character doesn't. Which brings me to my next point. So, one of the earlier trailers for the game back in 2014 showed the invasion of Insomnia, pretty much giving away the ending of the film. Like I just did right now. Uh but, somehow it didn't spoil the story. A trailer at Tokyo Game Show 2 months before uh our release unveiled the main villain, which the player character realizes only halfway through the game. But, this also didn't ruin things like I feared it might. And so, I think this owes to the story's reliance on suspense over surprise. I imagine a lot of you are familiar with the Hitchcock parable about the bomb in a restaurant. Uh you know, if the bomb goes off without warning, you surprise the audience for 10 seconds. Whereas, if you let the audience know there's a bomb under the table that'll go off at 3:00 and you put a clock in the back that says 2:45, you get 15 minutes of suspense. So, spoilers really only spoil stories when they when the story is

intentionally hide things or mislead the audience uh to hit them with a twist. I mean, you know that Caesar is going to die in the end, but you stay tuned to Julius Caesar to find out how. So, in the age of internet crowd-sourced theories, where kind of every outcome can be anticipated by someone, uh leaning on big twists is becoming uh less and less kind of tenable. Unless you can completely fence your game experience off. Uh so, naturally, you need some surprises in your work. Uh you don't want it to be too boring. But, if you're relying on the big uh twist in 2017, uh it's not a good idea. Okay, so the meaning of life. Uh hold on. I skipped ahead one. So, life is short, which is to say fleeting or finite. So, Final Fantasy 15 wasn't really built for eternity. Uh it's not going to be brought out of cobwebs and 100 years from now uh be ported to PlayStation 42. The language and reality present is very much a product of our time and the

experience is constantly kind of evolving to survive. Uh my second point is that life is messy. I'm sorry, I didn't set this up good enough. Uh so, by meaning of life, what I mean by this is uh When I said bringing fantasy to life as the topic for the talk, uh life is a very vague thing and I realize a lot of people copped to it. So, I wanted to talk about what life meant to me in the scope of Final Fantasy 15. So, first being life is short, where uh obviously, it's a product of its time uh and then life is messy being all the unpredictable things that happen on Final Fantasy 15. It doesn't really have emergent narrative, uh but it's also far from authorial because there's so many hands in it both development side and promotional side. And so, I'm not as sure what it's going to look like a year from now, which is both frightening and exhilarating, a lot like life. And then my last point uh is that life is fun. Uh so, so many cool things uh have happened that we didn't expect. Our

voice actors play the game on Twitch, uh these forum debates and these hilarious memes and our team is always taking it and finding ways to tuck it into the game. Uh there was someone on our marketing team kind of butt-dialed a tweet once and it was this random string of letters uh that got like a million likes. It was ridiculous. So, we just took that and made it one of like the in the mobile game, it's one of the random names it generates. Um so, just being able to kind of tie those things together, uh it's been a lot of fun. So, all the missteps and successes along the way have made for an amazing ride. And so, making the game was a lot of fun. I hope playing the game was a lot of fun. And talking here has been a lot of fun. So, thank you. Woo!