I must apologize for the headline, but it’s true. At least, I would never have guessed the person if it wasn’t explicitly spelled out for me. In a presentation at GDC this week, Final Fantasy XV Localization Director Dan Inoue spilled a little inside information on the hit game, and one bit of information was the inspirational figure behind the English voice of Noctis.

It’s none other than Nirvana’s iconic lead singer, Kurt Cobain. Yeah, I don’t see it either, but Inoue has his logic.

Generally, Inoue doesn’t like to use actual people as inspirations for his voice acting crew, and he prefers larger than life personalities that you don’t often find in the real world. For example, Prompto, the happy, bumbling dweeb of the group. Nobody would be friends with someone like that in real life.

However, Inoue broke his rule for Prince Noctis when thinking of an inspiration, and he told his voice actor to channel Cobain because he always had an extra layer to his emo that most grunge singers did not. As for Noctis, he too could have easily been a generic emo figure, but his voice actor and Inoue chose to interpret him as a popular figure who still struggles with his place in the word. A sort of “a rockstar who spurns the spotlight.”

I can hear it, but I definitely can’t see it

My generation is the first who didn’t really get to know Cobain because he died when I was still nine years old and too Disneyfied to listen to his brand of grunge. I only learned about him through Weird Al, so yeah. I’m an early Millennial who couldn’t hang with Generation X’s music.

I can’t say I knew Kobain’s personality well enough to make the connection, but he certainly doesn’t look like Noctis. That’s for sure.

Instead, I can go find anybody who looks like Noctis on a night out on the town in the Dotonbori district of Osaka. The hosts with his haircut, sharp suits, and exhausted face are a dime a dozen.