Wey aye, pet: Final Fantasy 16's ganna have Geordies in it

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Final Fantasy 16 is very British. It’s very much the sort of game that comes after the blockbuster TV success of Game of Thrones; everything is bleak, there are lots of big battles, your main character has a direwolf-type pet that’s bound to him by blood, and there are pissed off Yorkshiremen everywhere. The developers, in an interview with VG247, were candid about the inspiration Game of Thrones had on the title – it’s popular fantasy fiction that dealt with its political and interpersonal themes adeptly, of course it was going to be impactful.

In an hour-long demo of the game, I played as protagonist, Clive, as he fought his way through one of the early-game dungeons. Companion character – the AI-controlled Cid – was at our side the whole way through. Cid is played by the gravel-voiced Yorkshire actor, Ralph Ineson – who you may recognise as Dagmer Cleftjaw in Game of Thrones or William in The Witch. He sounds like he’s been smoking 20 a day since he was six, or using pebbledash as mouthwash. And it really suits his character; a gruff, disenfranchised knight looking despairingly on at the crumbling world before him.

“One thing that we wanted to do right from the beginning was get the tone of the fantasy right,” says localisation director Michael-Christopher Koji Fox when we ask him why the team focused so specifically on this sort of British high fantasy in Final Fantasy 16. “There is the tendency to go ‘oh, it’s fantasy, let’s make it British English’, but then it’s just kind-of… all over the place. International audiences might hear it and think ‘yeah, ok,’ but people from the UK will hear a line or something and think ‘there is no way that person would actually say that,’ or ‘that’s just an American doing a terrible UK accent’.

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