In discussions of Japanese media like the Final Fantasy games, one character label tends to spin up a special kind of discourse: “female.” In Japanese games, anime, and manga, more action-based stories tend to have male leads because the target audience tends to be male. Over the years, gaming and anime alike have seen more and more women take to the battlefield, even if the main characters are usually still men. But while there has been a lot of progress in how proactively women are written in video games, there have still been some common tropes that tend to follow female characters around. They might need saving, they might worry that being able to fight makes them “unfeminine,” or their character design could be oversexualized to the point of demeaning. Even in Final Fantasy, women are often boxed into some idea of what’s “proper” for a girl, either by making her the image of what the writer sees as an ideal woman or by making fun of her for not having those traits.
A lot of this is simply due to cultural differences, and women written like that aren’t inherently bad characters. But the prevalence of these tropes leads to discourse over what makes a “strong” female character in a video game, and it’s a volatile enough topic that asking for a “feminist” JRPG on Reddit can attract some ugly answers on all sides. But whether you think there’s an inherent sexism in the typical “anime waifu” or not, it’s refreshing on those few occasions where a playable woman truly averts the typical clichés associated with her gender. Final Fantasy 9 did a great job of this with the character of Freya Crescent and her dynamic with her lost love, Sir Fratley…which is why it’s frustrating that the game just drops her storyline so early on.
Spoilers for Final Fantasy 9 ahead!
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Who is Freya Crescent?
Freya Crescent hails from Burmecia and was one of her kingdom’s strongest Dragon Knights. One day, her lover and fellow knight Sir Fratley left the kingdom to test himself against stronger foes, but by the time the game begins five years later, he still hasn’t returned. Eventually, Freya also set aside her soldiership to go and find Fratley herself. While she eventually succeeds, she’s devastated to find that he has lost his memory. To make matters worse, this discovery is preceded by Burmecia’s fall and immediately followed by the destruction of her people’s last refuge, Cleyra. Thankfully, Fratley survived that ordeal as well, and by the end of the game the two of them are together again…though sadly, Fratley still hasn’t recovered his memories.
Rearrange the covers into the correct US release order.
Rearrange the covers into the correct US release order.
Freya being motivated to leave Burmecia because of Fratley could be interpreted as her being a character defined by her romantic interest, which is a common pitfall for women in fiction. But her quest to find Sir Fratley mostly stays in the background even before the story stops focusing on her, and her arc in disc 2 is really more about her trying and tragically failing to protect Burmecia and Cleyra. After Fratley returns, too, it’s never implied that Freya gave up fighting to be his wife or anything. While he doesn’t have a lot of screentime, the story does a pretty good job at implying he and Freya were equals in their relationship before his disappearance, and his amnesia actually unbalances things by putting Freya in the position of power over him.
Reversing "Women in Refrigerators"
But more than anything else, Sir Fratley fits the trope of the “lost Lenore” for Freya – someone who a character loved, but tragically lost in some way whose memory haunts the narrative for that character going forward. This is a common trope for male characters, to the point where killing off their lovers to give them a motivation has become a contentious writing device known as “women in refrigerators.” Coined by comic writer Gail Simone, the trope got its name from an infamous Green Lantern incident where a dead woman was left in, well, a refrigerator for her lover to discover and to motivate him to avenge her. Final Fantasy itself had done this before FF9, with the most infamous example coming from Final Fantasy 7. Granted, whether the character in FF7 was truly “fridged” warrants a whole other discussion, but the point remains that her death added extra motivation for Cloud to go forward in his journey.
Fratley wasn’t completely fridged — he was thought dead for a while after Cleyra fell, but the ending shows that he survived. But his missing memories mean that a huge part of Fratley is effectively dead. He does fall in love with Freya all over again, but she’s clearly still sad that he hasn’t recovered his memories by the end of the game:
Fratley: …I love you, Freya.
Freya: (...Yet he still doesn’t remember our past.)
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Freya's Poor Payoff
Freya and Fratley have a reverse “women in refrigerators” dynamic, but they also have a happy ending. Yet as nice as it is to see a woman who wants to avenge her man instead of the other way around, there’s still a big issue with Freya’s story: after disc 2, her story presence drops dramatically. It’s natural that the overall plot would focus more on central protagonists Zidane and Dagger as the story gets closer to its climax, but there were so many dramatic possibilities to explore for Freya that never got touched upon. She could have had a very compelling storyline of deciding whether she could forgive Beatrix or not for helping in Burmecia’s downfall, or even struggled with separating her opinion of Dagger from her opinion of Brahne.
Freya shows a few signs of bonding with the even more underdeveloped Amarant, but most of her dialogue after Burmecia is just commenting on what’s happening around her rather than what Freya herself is currently feeling. She had a lot of stuff thrown onto her – the destruction of her home and people, the disappearance and then amnesia of Sir Fratley, and how she was powerless to stop any of those things. But overall, Freya ends up just being a body to fill the Final Fantasy series’ recurring niche of “Dragoon” in combat.
Part of the issue here is in how Burmecia and Cleyra are used as sacrifices to show how evil Brahne and Kuja are, and then aren’t really brought up again for the rest of the story. The fact that they’re consecutive dungeon areas also makes Freya’s arc feel rushed because it all happens in succession – it makes the absence of any major Freya story beats feel much more obvious later on. If Cleyra had been moved to disc 3 or 4, then Freya’s story would, if artificially, feel longer simply because the player would have to wait longer to learn more about her.
There’s also the part where besides Zidane and occasionally Amarant, Freya doesn’t really talk to the other party members in FF9. Zidane is of course the hero, so he bonds with everyone. Garnet has a strong bond with Steiner from the start and gets close with Eiko as the story progresses, Steiner develops a soft spot for Vivi, Vivi and Eiko get some banter together later, but Freya doesn’t really bond with anyone. Again, Amarant has a similar problem, as does Quina, though Quina is written so unseriously that their lack of development is on purpose. FF9’s core playable cast is great, but it’s clear as the story progresses that plot-wise, Freya and Amarant got the short end of the stick.
Despite it All, Freya Crescent is a Good Character
Freya’s not a revolutionary character on her own. She’s a knight who lost her home and her lover and now has to find a reason to live in a world without the things that drove her for so long. If she were a man, this would actually be pretty standard JRPG storytelling. But as cheesy as it sounds, having a woman be the one to have this type of story was something relatively new at the time of FF9’s release.
Rumors have flown around for years about a possible FF9 remake. While the original is still easily available and absolutely stands on its own as a good game, characters like Freya came out underbaked. It’s a darn shame, too, because in a genre — and even in the game itself — where developers seem to worry that players won’t care about women unless they’re nice to look at, Freya is impressive. She’s a snappily-dressed nonhuman who actually looks like the species she’s described as, who can carry herself in a fight, and who never worries about how others view her. Sure, the world would be boring if women were all written like Freya Crescent, but she’s unique enough that it’d be awfully nice to see more writers follow her example for their own female characters.
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 81 /100 Critics Rec: 81%
- Released
- July 7, 2000
- ESRB
- T for Teen: Violence, Mild Language
- Developer(s)
- Square Enix
- Publisher(s)
- Square Enix
WHERE TO PLAY
- Genre(s)
- JRPG
