Final Fantasy 14have proven time and time again that they have boundless creativity. From building museums and staging plays to hosting large festivals, the land of Eorzea is filled with the ways that dedicated players have expressed their love ofFinal Fantasy 14and its community.
One of the large annual celebrations hosted in-game is A Feast Reborn, a food festival pioneered by the owner of restaurant free company Abbiocco Fine Dining, who goes by Nyte Snow in-game. Snow’s food festival brings together culinary roleplayers, real-world chefs, performers, artists and streamers to celebrate the good eats of Square-Enix’scritically acclaimed MMO. Snow spoke to Game Rant about this year’s event, which will be held October 7-8, 2023 starting at 3PM Eastern on the Crystal Datacenter’s Diabolos server, at the Goblet’s 14th ward, plot 35.The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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Q: How did you first get intoFinal Fantasy 14?
A:My boyfriend asked me to play actually. We met whileplayingElder Scrolls Online. And I was done with that game, the community was really toxic in my experience and I wanted to move on. So I was actually contemplatingWorld of Warcraft’s latest expansion when he’s like, “well try14with me, I think you’ll like it.” And I’m like, “What, it’s turn based, I’m not gonna like that.” He’s like, “Silly. It’s online. It’s not turn-based.” So I tried it, and just absolutely fell in love with it.
Q: How did A Feast Reborn get started?
A:I started off inFinal Fantasy 14by operating my own restaurant. When we first started, it was me and a friend called Maes, who started it and we called it Intangible Dreams. We thought that was creative. It was rather typical. Something where it wasn’t it wasn’t as unique and aimless and thought it was going to be. But Maes’ player quickly burnt out on it.
So I took over and we’re coming up to one year, right? And I’m like, “Okay, well, we’re gonna hold a one year party.” But the second one was like; what’s the big deal about a party, right? The only reason we were successful was because our friends stuck with us, right? Our friends went, even though they could have been doing something else, our friends told them about the place and convinced their friends to go. Our friends, you know,gave us a medium house to useinstead of a small and they didn’t charge us anything to use it for over a year. They just gave endlessly to help us be successful. So we wanted to kind of give back rather than just celebrate ourselves, but celebrate the community that made it possible to run a restaurant.
Q: How’d you get into roleplaying?
A:In 1996, I discovered the internet. Dial up chat room RP. And oh my god, I was so bad. First of all, I had read theDragonlancebooks and I knew thatthey were based off of D&D.I had read someForgotten Realmsbooks. But I went to a Catholic school and we weren’t allowed to play that game, it was bad. And then when I switched to the public school system, the school already had a group, they didn’t need more people, so I couldn’t get into it there. So finding roleplay on the internet was amazing for me.
But I was so bad. I was a vampire who was super beautiful, because of course. I had personal body issues and appearance issues, so my character was super beautiful, irresistibly attractive. Because I was a very ancient powerful vampire, my wounds healed almost immediately. And I was super strong. Or so awful, every freaking cliche Mary Suism that I could do, I did.
That has kind of also been though, a big driver in the way I roleplay with people now, in that no matter how bad they are. I want to roleplay with them, because we were all bad once. Like if you think back to the first time you roleplayed, I bet you cringe. When roleplayers become elitist, and become judgmental, and say, “Oh my God, that person is so bad, I don’t want anything to do with them,” you help shrink the roleplay community. You don’t help it get better, you don’t help it improve. There are so many roleplayers that I consider excellent roleplayers that started off in bad places like I did. And you see them improve because you provide them with guidance, right? “Here’s another way you could do what you’re doing, but in a way that’s more acceptable to other players.” Being able to do that one on one type of thing is really important.
All this is because I was a terrible, terrible vampire and people still accepted me and helped me get better.
I can’t think of many people who popped out of the roleplay box perfect. You’re so excited when you start. You’re so into your own character, and you’re just wanting to have fun with it. But because you’re so deep into your own character, your own self, you don’t really realize that you’re interacting with the world like a complete dipstick. Only experience will make that better or worse, and it’s my goal to verify that it’s better, not worse. I’m not going to ever exclude someone for being new. I’m going to exclude people for being racist, or I’m going to exclude people for being harassers, I’m going to exclude people who are hurtful and mean and cruel out of character. But I’m not going to exclude someone from my circle of roleplay because they’re new or bad at it, because they’re not bad people at it. They’re just new at it, you know?
Q: What’s the roleplaying scene in Final Fantasy 14 like at the moment?
A:Oh, it’s so healthy. There’s just so many different places. The DJ club seems to be overpowering a lot of what we see in party finders, but websites like Final Fantasy 14 Venues are really great for being able to search up different types of venues. you’re able to narrow it down by criteria. So like if you’re looking for a restaurant or you’re looking for a fight club, there’s all sorts of different venues out there that you can look up and search by name or to see what’s open now. It’s such a great resource.
And people are out to support each other. We saw that last year. So during A Feast Reborn last year, we had what we calledthe Thanos Snap. The game got hit with a DDoS attack, and like half of the people there just all of a sudden, pokeballed [a colloquialism players use for disconnecting]. Vendors, fairgoers, poof, they vanish on us. 50% of the population, poof, so we call it the Thanos Snap. So suddenly, there were booths that were empty, but there were still people there, and vendors who had more than one person at their booth would slip over to the other booth and manage the other booth for the person who was Thanos Snapped, so the roleplay could continue. We saw that kind of community where everybody was just there to support each other and keep things going. My bands vanished. The band that was playing went poof, and one Bard stood up and just started playing and kept the music going. I was running the Taco2Go takeaway, because the taco wagon had vanished. You know, everybody was just like, it came together. This is really great.
This year, we’re trying pudding wrestling, because some of our vendors are also fight clubs. And they wanted to try introducing fight clubs to A Feast Reborn. So instead of mud wrestling, we made it pudding wrestling, so it was food related. We managed to get a second house right beside our venue, so we now have a second building on the same square and the pudding wrestling is going to be in the basement of the small. We’re going to have a pudding pit set up. It’s going to be a lot of fun, I hope.
But maybe it won’t work. Maybe it’ll flop. And that’s okay, we’ll try something new. If it doesn’t work, well, it goes into the box of things that didn’t work, but we tried it, and we’ll try something new.
This is a really friendly community, it’s really welcoming. I know this isn’t like a discussion on whether adult roleplay or erotic roleplay is appropriate in a game or appropriate roleplay period, but I found that the community here is not really all that judgmental of it. If people want to do it, and they’re consenting adults, you know, they can do what they want. And they can work alongside a venue that has a sideline as a brothel or something like that. They have no problem with it, because roleplay is roleplay and there’s no room for judgment.
The game is really open fortrans and LGBTQ peopletoo. I mean, like any place where people want to come out and be who they really are there’s still risks involved with it. There are still people out there that are going to have judgments and just dumb moments, or who are going to be ignorant and just aren’t going to know better. But it just seems like such a warm and welcoming place that it’s safe to be who you really are.
Q: The pudding wrestling is a great transition into: what are some highlights of this year’s A Feast Reborn?
A:Well, there is the housing contest. To enter you have to be running a venue already and it has to be in a small house or an apartment and you have to create a menu and put it into our form. Then there’s going to be a panel of judges plus a public vote. I’ll tell you right now we’ve only had one entry. So it’s quite possible it’s just going to come down to a default win for that one entry. It’s not gonna break my heart if that happens, because the goal is to help someone and as long as someone signed up, we’re helping someone, right? Yeah, it would be fun to see others take advantage of that.
So we don’t have a dance troupe this year, the dance troupe last year was really popular, but they weren’t able to return this year. And unfortunately, it’s kind of short notice now to pull someone in and we’ve already got such a packed calendar. We reduced the hours from four to three each day, but we do have the after party for an hour and a half after the festival each day.
On Sunday, it’s gonna be DJ Limit Break. he’ll be spinning tunes while we play Lalaball, which requires two teams of blue mages, and a lalafell.
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Q:I saw that Mogstock!
A:Yes, and that’s where I found it too. It’s coming. It’s going to be a blast and is going to be hilarious.
We’re going to have photographers and caricature artists. I’m hoping that I’m gonna find my two Lalafell volunteers to dress up as our choco friends because get them to dress up as chocobos and dye that one red and one turquoise to be the chocos in our logo so you can get your photos with the Chocos. We have 15 booths each day so that’s like a total of 30 different vendors, which is just like a doubling from last year. What else? There’s pudding wrestling. There’s, you know, the hourly band, we have our giveaways and the silent picnic auction.
Oh, yes. One of the big, big things. So this year, we’re trying to also give back in real life. We were inspired by Menphina Madness, the blitzball league that folded last year. Over their several years of running blitzball, they raised more than $12,000 USD for charity. So we’ve partnered with Action Against Hunger, which is a nonprofit that tackles food insecurity worldwide. It spends 91 cents of every dollar on helping the food insecurity problem. And it’s not about just delivering food and saying “Here you go,” it’s about creating infrastructure as well to help support food production. And it’s culturally and ethnically responsible and respectful so, for example, they’re not going to build a dairy farm in a region that traditionally does not eat dairy and may or may not be lactose intolerant. It’s not going to build a pig farm to service heavily Muslim or Jewish population because they don’t eat pork, right? It’s going to find things that are ethnically and ethically responsible and are going to be environmentally responsible.
One of the great things about it is it has an online platform to accept donations which means we never touch the money ourselves. There’ll be a link on the website that you can click and if you choose to make a donation you can just say that you are doing it inspired by and put your character name, and you’ll be entered into a draw for a prize. Even if it’s $5. And the great thing is it’s worldwide, right? So whether you’re playing in Australia or Canada or South America, or I don’t know where else you play, there’s a possibility that it will actually be doing Action Against Hunger in your local community. And having that worldwide nature of it was really important to us becauseFinal Fantasy 14is a worldwide game.
Q: You’re giving away a medium house at A Feast Reborn this year, aren’t you? Sort of paying it forward?
A:Yes. So we’ve secured a medium on another server. We were able to do that because of the hard work of one of our organizers, Key. Shewas able to build a free company on other servers and basicallystart the bidding processto get a meeting, and she was successful. Our goal is to kind of do what was done for us, you know? Support a venue that is operating out of let’s say, an apartment room or a small, help them get into a medium.
We understand that there’s some challenges with that, you know. We have a medium on one server. And that’s it. We had hoped to get more, but the lotteries did not come in our favor. So that means whoever wins it has to be willing to relocate to another server. We understand that there can be challenges if they have to relocate servers. We recently did that with our restaurant too. We upgraded to a large, but it wasn’t on Mateus where the medium and our small that we got started in were. So I created an alt on Diablos. And that’s how we run the house there. So there are ways around it, but there are expenses involved too when it comes to searching servers. We’re keeping the server the house is on under our hats for now.
So the first year it cost us about 40 million to run A Feast Reborn. We did not break even the first year. Last year, it cost us probably about 150 milliongilto run, we broke even with a tiny bit of profit. Keep in mind, though, last year, because we had just moved to the large estate, we had to rebuild everything because it was a different server. We couldn’t transfer our booths and our props and all those things. This year, we’re hoping that we’re going to break even, and we’re going to have a decent pillow to do things for next year, right?
Whether it’s trying to get more houses to help out and run contests or to help other venues get started, it’s not just money in our pockets. It’s stuff that we attempt to feed back into our community. By helping other venues and doing things. We do our Santa photos every Christmas [the Starlight Celebration event], where we have a setup where you can come and sit on a Roegadyn’s knee using a sneaky stool setup. And then we’re thinking about adding something like a springtime sort of thing. But we haven’t quite figured out what it’s going to be. Part of me is thinking that I might want to do a big Naadam festival type of thing and, and have a big fight club night, or weekend or tournament or something. And there’s a lot of space in the community to be having these types of events. So I want to do that.
Q: What can you share about culinary roleplay?
A:Fun fact, I set pots of water on fire in real life.
There is something really enjoyable about creating an experience for another player that is so three-dimensional that they’re able to imagine tasting that food and smelling it, hearing the chopping sounds on the cutting board or the burbling of a pot as water boils.Creating an experience for someonewhere they can sit back with a friend or someone that they’re really fond of and just create such a vivid experience, it’s just so rewarding. And I mean, it’s not for everybody, not everybody has the desire to serve others. Goodness knows that I don’t like to serve others all the time, but there is a lot of reward and providing for others. And that’s a big part of culinary roleplay.
Q: What makes Final Fantasy 14 a good medium and for talking about food?
A:There’s such a wide variety of players in this game. And there’s such a wide variety of roleplay in this game. I ran a roleplayguild inWorld of Warcraftfor more than 10 years, and there were a few venues that I went to that did the food roleplay, but I never found anything like what’s in this game.
I don’t know if it was powered by the pandemic and not being able to go out like we used to or if it’s just the different type of experience players want. It just seems that there’s support for it here and acceptance of it here and just acceptance on a really broad level. You know, people want to hang out with their friends, and they want to hang out like in social settings. And there’s less stigma about doing it online now thanks to the pandemic that there was beforehand.
Q: Speaking of real life, have you tried any like Meals inspired by Final Fantasy 14?
But as for trying things, there is a long-standing joke that I don’t like anything. But I have tried some of the things that J’kara has put on our menu. J’kara is one of our chefs, they don’t play anymore because they’re an actual chef, and they don’t want to come home from work and work some more. But they did help us design a menu and Jakara came through during a tough time, and helped me plan a special meal for my family. So even though it’s not one of the foods from the game, it came about because of the game. That soup apparently was a very good soup. I wouldn’t know, I don’t have a lot of comparison points.
Q: Have you ever done the Culinarian job in game?
A: Yes, I have it at max level currently.
Q: What’s playing Culinarian like? And do you have any advice for people who are picking it up?
A:My biggest advice is verify that you’ve leveled up your botany skill, because you’re going to need it. Fishing is not as important to culinarian once you get past the early levels, so don’t feel like you have to do that religiously. It’s actually really shameful how fishing does not support culinarian because it’s literallyyou’re fishing up food, but you’re not actually using it for food?
Leves are a great helper for leveling. But the best thing I can recommend is to have really good music to listen to, because you’re going to be crafting. Scrips are good, it’ll help simplify things. Once you have a pattern of skills down, you may create a macro that you just press the macro, and it will beep when you’re done. It just saves time. It doesn’t really change anything. There are skills that you would be using anyway. It just means you don’t have to sit there and click some one by one–you can just hit the button, let it go, take a sip of your drink, read an article about cute kittens in the other window.
But yeah, like any craft, there’s a little bit of grinding involved, isn’t it? But it can be really rewarding. Expert deliveries are also vital to leveling.
Q: Why do you think food has gotten such a prominent role in video games in the last few years?
A:I think it’s because no matter what type of game we’re playing, we can connect with food. Whether it’s a Twinkie and a zombie apocalypse world, or a burger with your favorite catboy. you’re able to close your eyes for a second and imagine eating that right? It doesn’t matter what universe with what weirdness. If someone offers you a tentacle burger, you can imagine eating an octopus burger. You can imagine it, you can visualize it, you can think of what it would smell like or what it would taste like or how you would prepare it or season it. So it gives us that kind of anchor point in between these different worlds that we play in and reality, and it gives us a point of reference
Q: What are you hoping to see from Dawntrail?
A:I want to see the start of a story that is as engrossing as the last two expenses have been. Shadowbringers and Endwalker. At the same time, I would love to see our hero not get the ever-loving crap beat out of his mental health. Likegive the poor dude a break. When I saw him on that boat in the trailer, and I just saw how at peace and happy he looked, I’m like, “Oh, finally, the world’s not ending and people aren’t killing you.” And it’s not a race to save the world. You’re just off to have an adventure again, you’re back to being just some dude. I hope he gets to be just some dude for at least an expansion before, you know, the world’s about to end because of raging space monkeys or something.
Q: Is there anything else about food or A Feast Reborn you want to add?
A:One thing, and I don’t know if people notice this, is our logo updates every year. So the first year just had the red choco. His name is Cinnamon. Then the second year, Penelope, the turquoise choco, joined him. And because I’m a big believer that colors and genders don’t necessarily have anything to do with them, I made sure the reverse: red one’s the boy, the blue one’s the girl. But she showed up and she was eating part of the logo. And this year, I was sitting down and having a picnic. But the broken part of the logo is like dangling off to the side. So it’s telling the story in the logo too. And I would love for people to give me some suggestions for next year. What’s going to happen with Penelope and Cinnamon? Are they going to have a romance? Or is she going to cannibalize the other?
You know, she’s hungry, she was like actually eating the logo. So there’s nothing to say she’s not gonna eat the other chocobo if he doesn’t keep her fed.
Another thing I’d really like to mention is that… like, you know, when you’re in school, and you get like, put into a group to do group work, and there’s one person in that group and you know they’re not going to do anything? So you have to do it yourself on the slide, just in case they don’t do it and you know they’re not going to do it, you can’t rely on them? I am so blessed that that person is not my partner in this. So I really want to make sure that we give Key a shoutout.
She is officially co-organizer with me this year, she handles all the prizes and all the contests. With her, it’s just a matter of saying she’s like, “I’m gonna do this.” And I don’t have to worry about it. It’s only at the very end when I have to start putting that stuff onto the website that I start bothering her and I can trust her completely without her. I couldn’t do this. And it makes me feel like I’m doing nothing to watch how hard she works. But then she just points out that I couldn’t she couldn’t handle rounding up like 60 people to do stuff at the festival. So I guess we both have our strengths. But yeah, she’s a miracle of a friend. She’s a good friend. And I appreciate her so much. And I just wanted to give her a shoutout. She was the one that found our charity this year as well.
I’m just so grateful for all the support. Because the first year we had 11 vendors and four of those 11 vendors were operated by people who actually work for my venue in some way. And in the second year, we had 15 venues, and this year, we have 30 vendors, and run none of them. And that just goes to show how much support the community wants to throw in behind this. And I’m just starting to sound like a broken record. I’m so grateful.
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Final Fantasy 14is available now for PC, PS4, and PS5, with an Xbox Series X/S version launching in Spring 2024.
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