Why the Food in ‘Final Fantasy XV’ Is So Damn Realistic

Well, some recipes take a long time to cook.

I've put in around 24 hours of playtime into Final Fantasy XV since its release. I can tell you that the story centers on young Prince Noctis and his three best friends/bodyguards road-tripping through a fantastical-yet-modern world in a sick convertible, camping out and having a great time being bros. The point of the game is ostensibly to lead Noctis on his quest to defend his homeland against invading forces and fulfill his destiny of ascending to his magically-powered throne, battling monsters and enemy forces along the way. But I haven't gotten that far; I've been far, far too occupied searching the countryside for ingredients and recipes. The world of Final Fantasy XV is rich with food, and the care taken to perfect it makes the years of development waiting time worth it.

Prince Noctis and his retinue's road trip to save the world is broken up with the pit stops of an actual road trip — a night out cooking over a camp stove, or a stop at a greasy spoon to try the local delicacy. "From early on in the development," says game director Hajime Tabata, "we strived for a game design that follows a cycle where characters have adventures during the daytime, and at night they camp and eat in order to prepare themselves for the following day." Final Fantasy XV is far from the first role-playing game to incorporate feeding your characters as part of their development; older games such as Star Ocean and Tales of Symphonia included game mechanics based around raising character stats by feeding them their favorite recipes. What makes Final Fantasy XV's food different is just how goddamn gorgeous it is.

"Recipes were just one element of the camping scenes, but the catalyst for our obsession was the high quality of the food graphics that the camp team was able to create in the pre-production phase," Tabata says. "In Japan, we have a term called 'meshi-tero' (an abbreviation of the Japanese-English combo phrase 'Meshi (food) Terror' and similar to the English term 'food porn'), but that pretty much summed it up. We have to create truly delicious-looking food scenes similar to those that appear in movies and anime."

One of the Prince's guards, Ignis, also serves as the chef of your party, and he can learn 103 different recipes to cook up for his friends at the camp site. He can be inspired by everything from finding a new kind of mushroom in the woods to taking down a giant frog that has an interesting cut of meat to reading a bit of poem on a sign. Even more dishes can be consumed at restaurants in other countries and cities that the party visits on their voyage. Eat an expensive seafood risotto at a bistro and it will fill Ignis with the inspiration to create a homemade version, with fish you catch yourself and ingredients you forage. Every dish is painstakingly, realistically rendered, and you, the poor player, only get to look, not taste. After eating their favorite camp-side meals, Prince Noctis and his friends get a temporary boosts to their attack power — akin to equipping a stronger sword or using a status-enhancing magical spell. All you're left with is a growling stomach.

The Square Enix food team preps a croque madame outdoors (top), photographing it (bottom left) for the digital artists. Artists then render it into the final dish that appears in the game (bottom right).

According to the game's art director, Tomohiro Hasegawa, creating the in-game dishes sometimes involved working off of food photography, but frequently involved actually cooking the recipes that appear. "It’s actually pretty difficult to make something look tasty in the game," Hasegawa says. "And I believe what beats even the best photography is the personal experience."

Creating a recipe in Final Fantasy XV involved several development team members. According to Hasegawa, the process begins in the art department, where the dish's ingredients and desired appearance are planned out. Another team takes it from there — takes it outside, specifically, to actually cook on a camp stove. "Our team members took out their gear and went camping to cook outdoors," says Hasegawa. "You know how even the simplest foods can taste really delicious when you’re out camping? We wanted to focus on that same feeling while we created them."

Ignis serves up some very fancy-looking meals in the Coleman-branded camp dishware in the game, but it's believable due to this detailed care in their creation. You can buy that the dedicated outdoor chef could make a beautiful croque madame at a campsite — because a team of dedicated outdoor chefs in Japan actually did the real-world work first.

The completed dishes, "served" in the game's camping and diner scenes, were then photographed from various angles. They were then scanned to create 3D data for the digital artists to work with, but artists weren't just left to work off of static images. The digital art team also handled the physical dishes prepared by the food team and their ingredients — how are you really going to perfectly render a zucchini unless you've actually held a slice yourself? Recipes were then tasted by the teams creating the in-game models, and the 3D data tweaked as necessary.

A digital rendering of a dish in progress (left), and as it appears in the game (right).

"I believe sharing feedback amongst the team members is what leads to the high-quality of the final recipe images," Hasegawa says. "This is not just for the recipes — within the Final Fantasy XV game production as a whole we constantly ask ourselves: 'How can we incorporate the team members’ real-life experiences into the game itself?'"

And there really is more to the food of Final Fantasy XV than its good looks. Those real-life experiences pay off in making the game experience a little more real for the player — especially if you're a food-obsessed one like me. If you felt like it, you could go through the game with only the simple recipes that chef Ignis has by default — toast, rice balls, veggie stew, croque madame — even though your party will complain about how they're unfulfilling and boring.

But cooking in the game has the same rewards as in real life: It's social. Preparing meals at camp can lead to different dialogues between the game's characters, letting you learn more about them and their relationships. After enough nights around the campfire, Ignis will teach Prince Noctis how to cook — your only contribution is wiggling the controller joystick back and forth to stir, but while enjoying the camp kitchen conversation between the two of them, learning more about how their friendship works.

The relationships kindled by the game’s shared meals are what keeps me playing. I know my boys’ favorite foods, and I'm not just encouraged to seek the recipes and ingredients for them because I know it'll give them an experience boost as I run around the wilderness killing monsters — I'm also doing it because I know it's going to make them happy. The little thumbs up, smile, or line of pleased dialogue from one of those nice fellas at the start of a game day give me that kick of gaming dopamine that hooks me in until I forget to actually eat food in the real world. I nearly got myself killed multiple times by running into monsters on my way to forage ingredients, and it was worth it every time.

Previous Final Fantasy games have not involved food as a component in either gameplay or plot. The meals in Final Fantasy XV made me realize what an absence that's been — real people eat, and working that into the game world makes it so much more relatable. It's not just the existence of familiar real-world elements like diners and food carts — it's the fact that you find the same greasy fast-food menu in every iteration of a diner across the map. Getting an identical basket of fries at one of the many Crow's Nest Diners you find throughout the game feels like stopping at a Waffle House or a Cracker Barrel on a long car trip. And in a strange stroke of product placement, you can purchase actual Cup Noodles in the game. (I'll only eat them as last resort, though; I've got much better things in my recipe book.)

The history and culture of the game world are deepened through its cuisine, too. Just like in my real life, my primary goal for visiting a new city in Final Fantasy XV is to see what the restaurants have to offer. And this was absolutely the goal. "In the game, food is part of the expression of each city’s culture," says Hasegawa. "However, what was important was not to focus on particular cultures, but to give the impression of traveling long distances by showing how culinary cultures change by region."

Obviously making sure players could fill out a recipe book with beautiful stews and sandwiches isn't entirely what made Final Fantasy XV take so long to finally see release. The game is beautiful and detailed throughout, with a similar amount of careful attention to many other aspects. And just the same, different parts of the game have unresolved issues that were surely the source of production delays. I hear the ending of the game needs some work. It'll probably be awhile before I find out myself, though; I've got peas to forage.

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