by James Slater
Thanksgiving is a time where you celebrate things you may be thankful for, and celebrate your familial and friendly connections between yourself and anyone you may know. It is well know that not every familial connection is one you’re born with. Family can come from people you just met or anyone you’ve known your whole life, as long as you find yourself at peace and welcome amongst them.
The found family trope remains one of my favorites in any type of media. Watching a protagonist, often staring along, develop a bond between what is usually a group of strangers, never fails to boost my opinion of whatever it is I’m playing. I’m currently playing through Metaphor: Refantazio, and I was glad to see that it follows alongside its other ATLUS developed games, and gives you a group of allies that start off unknown to yourself. Persona 5 remains my favorite ATLUS game (though it may be surpassed if Metaphor keeps at the pace it is), and it has my all time favorite example of this trope. I found even myself bonding with each and every member of the Phantom Thieves, and was genuinely heartbroken when the game came to an end and the group had to separate.
I found myself feeling this way as well with Baldur’s Gate 3. Even if my first playthrough failed to recruit every possible member, I still found myself really enjoying my time around the characters and the ones I was making with them and amongst each other. It felt closer to myself since it was mostly myself making the choices that led to the relationships I had between the characters, and I made it my mission to make sure everyone made it out. I was a bit upset during the epilogue when it was revealed that the cast never really kept up with each other for the months after the story concluded, but it makes sense. The characters were only brought together because of their similar and life threatening situation, so broadly speaking they were all just coworkers.
The trope itself is nothing new, as it can be found as far back as 1939’s The Wizard of Oz. Every form of media had its own examples of this trope. TV has Friends and Avatar The Last Airbender; Movies have Guardians of the Galaxy and Lilo and Stitch, and Games has Fire Emblem: Three Houses and Mass Effect. Obviously there are dozens of examples for each, but all of them follow some sort of this trope, each of them with their own spin on it to make it stand out amongst each other.
Some games range from as low as a group of two, a la The Last of Us, or can range up to the double digits, as seen in most Fire Emblem games. While most would think it’s difficult to care about the wellbeing of a group that large, surprisingly Three Houses has one of my favorite casts in gaming, and I care about each character from every house. I go out of my way to level up the connection between myself and each character, and spent multiple playthrough maxing out each relationship possible.
As I eluded to before, the major drawback for this trope is the ending. Rarely do the families ever stay together once the credits roll. Persona finds a way to send the protagonist off on their own at the end of each game; Bladur’s Gate simply has each person go off on their own journey, reconvening at the end, and other games bring tragedy into the mix, separating the group via the way of character(s) deaths. Each of these pride effective in their own ways. It’s only natural that people go off into their own lives, and especially since most games take place over the course of only a couple months to maybe a year, this wouldn’t be enough time for most people to form lifelong bonds with each other, and split off once the force keeping them together is taken care of.
However the outcome is for the newly brought together groups of characters, the found family trope is one I don’t see myself ever getting tired of. Soemthing about oftentimes random people come together in the face of an adventure and still having time to develop relationships amongst themselves is endearing everytime I see it. After I complete Metaphor, I’ll be hopefully awaiting for another game to come along and play into the trope as well. Hopefully the wait isn’t too long until then, but between Unicorn Overlord, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, 2024 supplied plenty of one of my favorite tropes, and I hope 2025 does the same.
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