By now most of you have seen the tantalizingly rendered food in Final Fantasy XV. It looks so good it sure can be a sure-fire hit as an Instagram post. While food has never been an item of value in most Final Fantasy games, and some RPG games don’t need food when you can have herbs and potions to do all the healing. But in Final Fantasy XV, the team had modelled various dishes, some of them based on real ones. It’s not just there for food porn. It gives you buffs. Strong buffs.
These buffs vary from dish to dish, but most of the strongest ones come at a high price. Really high. To put in perspective, a plate of roti canai (called in-game as “roti and cury plate”) found at a corner stall in Lestallum costs up to 1,200 gil. For reference, a drink of potion- where in Final Fantasy XV is just an energy drink- costs 50 gil. That’s.. 24 bottles of potion. That even beats the expensive roti canai plate at a certain convention that got some attention recently. Ahem.
High- end dishes can cost extravagantly, up to 7,800 gil was the highest we saw in the playthrough for the upcoming review, and probably not the highest. But the buffs are immensely powerful. Don’t want to cough that much cash for a meal? You can cook your own when camping outdoors for the night. Your resident chef Ignis can cook up many dishes and along the way, can learn new recipes for better dishes, and even replicate ones served in the many diners throughout Lucis. Though you need to have the right ingredients- some rare ones can fetch a hefty price, but if it’s fish, you can get Noctis go fishing for your next dinner ingredient.
And gil doesn’t come easily this time around- enemies don’t drop gil. The best source for money is to go on hunts. Many diners in Lucis have bounty for various monsters and demons. A few other sidequests do reward some, but hunts are the most reliable. That and selling of loot from defeated enemies.. just don’t sell everything as certain loot is needed to upgrade weapons.
There are cheap and good food, most notably the Noodle Cup a real life brand of ramen. Interestingly, this advertisement includes a short quest on improving ramen with other ingredients, and the whole quest introduction was delivered with a self-aware tone. Suddenly Gladio talked like an advert. There’s also this ridiculous advert airing in Japan.
Here’s a selection of pretty looking dishes that you can encounter in the game.
While the good-looking food could have just been a novelty addition, it adds up to the various system in the game to make it a worthy feature to highlight. It makes money scarce, it feeds to the other skills and mini-games, and the incentives are strong to pursue. Plus, it’s an added touch to the whole roadtrip story- eating food with buddies is something we can all relate too.
Stay tuned for more coverage of Final Fantasy XV, as well as the full review coming soon.