Prompto Argentum

a character from a game

Prompto Argentum is a companion of Noctis and a party member in Final Fantasy XV. Although not directly controllable, he is in Noctis's party and the player will be able to co-opt moves with him and issue him commands.

He is a childhood friend of Noctis and wields firearms. Prompto takes photos with his smartphone, and for a certain reason, wants to save pictures of him and his friends while on the road trip. The player can upload these pictures to social media. It has been said the system was not just "thrown in", but will connect to the party's actions and the story. Though Final Fantasy XV won't have a specific high-quality photo mode, players can view the pictures Prompto takes during the journey in a gallery.

Appearance
Prompto is a young man of average height and a slender build. He has blue eyes, light freckles and short, unruly blond hair. He wears two bands on his right arm, black gloves, a black shirt with a white pattern, and a sleeveless black vest with a dark red flannel shirt attached underneath. He wears dark pants with a faint leopard print, which is also present on his gloves. He wears black boots with red soles that are lined with white fur.

Prompto's black open vest has various tags. The one below the collar reads: "It's a beautiful day now watch some bastard fuck it up." The middle one on the side resembles the logo. The back of Prompto's waistcoat reads "DEADORALIVE." Like all party members, Prompto has skull motifs to his outfit. The buttons on his jacket have skulls, he has a belt buckle in the shape of a skull, and another skull on the tag on his trousers.

As a child, Prompto was overweight and wore glasses and a two-tone tan T-shirt with a matching wristband.

Personality
Prompto maintains a playful attitude towards Noctis. He is described as a skirt-chasing mood maker with a chip on his shoulder from a different social status compared to his other friends, and thus feels inferior but wishes to be useful.

Though not a combat-hardened warrior, Prompto has a knack for cheering people up and keeping things light-hearted. This actually stems from having had a sad and lonely childhood, and his outward mannerisms conceal a deep thinker. The developers put a lot of thought into his animations because of this duality, making him always moving and being more reactive than the other group members, exaggerating and overreacting. Prompto is good with machines, and tuned into technology and the latest trends including video games and anime.

Brotherhood Final Fantasy XV
During their journey to Caem, the party encounters an injured puppy whom Prompto manages to avoid hitting with the Regalia. When he treats it with first aid, he momentarily flashes back to his childhood.

Prompto was a lone overweight boy with no friends, whose only joy was to take photos and who (seemingly) lived alone, eating nothing but junk food. He encountered and treated a puppy with an injured leg, naming it "Tiny". Eventually, the puppy returned to its home with Lunafreya Nox Fleuret, where she noticed the name on the handkerchief Prompto had tied around the injured leg, and had her assistant investigate.

Prompto received a letter from Lunafreya expressing her thanks for taking care of her puppy, Pryna. Knowing that he attended the same school as Noctis, she requested that he becomes his friend since Noctis did not mingle much with his classmates. The next day, Prompto decided to approach Noctis, but stumbled. Noctis pulled him up, pointing that he's "heavy", and left as the bell rang. The event motivated Prompto to lose weight before approaching Noctis again. Prompto started jogging and dieting, taking photos of himself to track his progress until he had shed the excess weight. With new-found confidence, he approached Noctis again when they reached high school, who hardly recognized him.

Back in the present, Prompto lets the puppy go with its mother and the party resumes their journey. He asks Noctis if he can meet Lunafreya, and Noctis affirms.

Final Fantasy XV
Prompto accompanies Noctis on their road trip across the land toward Altissia to meet with Noctis's fiancée, Luna. They pass through the Duscae region where Prompto crashes the party's car, Regalia. They have the mechanic Cindy repair it at the local Coernix Station, but need to make some quick money to pay for it. They discover there is a bounty of 25,000 gil on a rampaging behemoth, and Prompto helps the others fell it by shooting at a tank of petrol to stun it. If Noctis summons Ramuh to fell the behemoth Prompto marvels at its power, saying he now knows why the legends speak of Archaeans so highly.

During their time at Duscae, Prompto asks Noctis to go pick up mushrooms as he's heard they are a local delicacy. While picking up mushrooms at the lake's edge the two are accosted by a catoblepas, and Prompto gets his foot stuck in the mud. Noctis and Prompto make a hair-thin escape, but Prompto loses the mushrooms. Later on the gang can marvel at a meteor shower, and when Prompto wants to document it the camera topples over before the picture can be taken.

Cindy repairs the Regalia and deflects Prompto's attempts at flirting when they go collect it. While the party drives on Prompto marvels at its astral shard, asking if it is on fire, and the giant Adamantoise they spot from the side of the road.

The party continues forward to ride a ferry to Altissia, but find it not running. The party soon learns that the capital has been attacked and turn back, only to find the city blockaded. With little recourse, they leave to find a different way to meet with Luna, in hopes she escaped the city.

Party member
Prompto uses a variety of firearms, including handguns and shotguns. He can co-opt moves with Noctis, such as by pushing him away from the harm's way, and shoot enemies from either a range or from close-up. One of his physical abilities is Bulletbind, which he can use to freeze his enemies.

He has the least HP of the party. In the Final Fantasy XV Episode Duscae demo he has a skill that inflicts Stop on enemies, and can set up and join in on Cross Chain attacks. In the Niflheim base infiltration trailer, the player invokes Prompto to throw a flare at a group of magitek soldiers, lighting up the area and momentarily stunning the soldiers.

VR
As revealed at E3 2016, Prompto will be directly playable in first person by using. The available control schemes and whether this allows for 2-player co-op were not stated. However, the trailer emphasized the ability to target enemy weak points similar to his abilities in early development.

Creation and development
Prompto's design went through an overhaul during development since he was first unveiled for Final Fantasy Versus XIII, which ended up being reworked into Final Fantasy XV. His hair was straightened, spiked up, and changed golden blond from its curly dirty blond inceptions, and his facial features were modified as well to give him a more rugged, masculine look.

His face was again redesigned from the version unveiled at E3 2013 when the game was re-announced as Final Fantasy XV. Prompto's hair and facial features were altered after receiving negative feedback so that users around the world would better receive the game. Yusuke Naora is one of three art directors on Final Fantasy XV, and one of his early tasks on the project was to update the look of the characters from their incarnation in Final Fantasy Versus XIII.

It was originally envisioned all party members would be playable with Prompto able to manually aim firearms that could be used to target enemy weak points. However, the battle system was later changed to make only Noctis directly playable.

Director Hajime Tabata has explained that black has historically been treated as a special color in the kingdom of Lucis. Thus the attire of the royal family, and those in occupations closely tied to it, wear black. The art staff wanted to make it easy to distinguish the characters even though they all wear black. The team wanted to make them come alive both in technical and artistic ways, and ways to make the characters relateable were discussed endlessly. At the beginning of the development, a special unit was formed to create the cast's personal traits. The team also paid attention to feedback from players, especially in Prompto, whom many found annoying for the contrast he'd behave compared to the others. The team decided to emphasize certain parts of Prompto's character to make him more likeable.

A Final Fantasy XV animator, Toyama, shared some details on how Prompto was animated via official social media. Using motion capture, the animators film their own movements either in special mo-cap suits or in what the characters actually wear in the game. The recorded data is polished by adjusting the poses and movements, adding finger animations, etc. before the animations can be implemented. The animators check how the character movements flow in-game together with the clothes, which are controlled via cloth simulator. Aside from animations, a variety of things need also to be checked, such as SFX and VFX.

Voice
Prompto is voiced by Tetsuya Kakihara in Japanese. In Brotherhood Final Fantasy XV anime, his younger self is voice by Aki Kaneda.

Merchandise
Prompto will be available as a Plat Arts -Kai- figure.

Gallery

 * Final Fantasy Versus XIII

Etymology
Thus, Prompto's name may have been an incorrect attempt to translate "quicksilver" into Latin.

Trivia

 * During the party's time in the cave in Duscae in Episode Duscae demo, Prompto says "Snakes, why did it have to be snakes?" This refers to Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the titular character utters the same quote when he ends up in a tomb full of snakes.