Roleplaying, Art, and Charity on the Menu at Final Fantasy…

Summary

Final Fantasy 14's A Feast Reborn is a food festival in the game that combines the love for food and the artistic nature of players, featuring wandering artists, a cooking show, and a small crafts market.
This year's event will include pudding wrestling as a fun and food-related activity, with a pudding pit set up in the basement of a newly acquired second building.
The festival also gives back to the Final Fantasy 14 community by awarding a medium property to a roleplay restaurateur who can design a three-course meal for an in-game cooking competition, and encourages attendees to donate to the real-world charity Action Against Hunger.

Food has enjoyed a growing prominence in video games, from the rise of the video game cookbook to the memetic status of Starfield’s Chunks. Final Fantasy 14 is hardly an exception to this, with its rich culture of roleplaying restaurants and a real-world café in Japan.

Final Fantasy 14 is also no stranger to ambitious players from across the community engaging in massive projects, be they museums, music festivals, or writing and staging unique plays. Combining the touchstone that food brings to a game and the artistic and dramatic nature of the game’s players in a banquet for the senses seems, therefore, an inevitable decision. Enter Nyte Snow, the character name of the woman who runs the roleplay eatery Abbiocco Fine Dining on the Diabolos server of the Crystal datacenter. Snow will be hosting the third annual food festival A Feast Reborn on October 7th and 8th, starting at 3PM Eastern and running for three hours a night at Abbiocco’s location: Plot 35 of the Goblet’s 14th ward.

A Feast Reborn, a play on Final Fantasy 14’s legendary comeback ten years ago with A Realm Reborn, features wandering artists, a cooking show, a small crafts market, music, streamers, and of course plenty of roleplayers making one another hungry. Snow told The Best War Games in an interview about another highlight to this year’s event: pudding wrestling.

“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.”

How A Feast Reborn Gives Back To Final Fantasy 14 Fans

Snow also spoke about the ways A Feast Reborn gives back to the community. For instance, Abbiocco got its start by being gifted a house, a challenging commodity to land in Final Fantasy 14, and set a goal of paying that gift forward by awarding a medium property on the Crystal datacenter to a roleplay restaurateur who could design a three-course meal for an in-game cooking competition.

Providing those experiences is what it’s about for Snow, and many other roleplayers besides. She thinks food is a particularly good way of providing that experience, as no matter how fantastical the setting, food is something that brings people together.

“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 someone where 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.”

It’s also a chance to live a life not normally available to her, as despite being a successful restaurateur in roleplay, Snow admits she “set pots of water on fire in real life.”

Beyond the game itself, A Feast Reborn is also encouraging attendees to donate to the real-world charity Action Against Hunger. Final Fantasy 14 roleplayers actually have some history as charitable fundraisers, with the now-defunct Hydaelyn Blitzball Association raising over $12,000 for charity with its annual Menphina Madness roleplaying events and the Eorzea Rescue concert in early 2023 served as a fundraiser to help victims of earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. A global charity fighting hunger was an obvious cause for a food festival to fundraise for, Snow said.

“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 because Final Fantasy 14 is a worldwide game.”

Highlighting A Feast Reborn's Plentiful Food and Bright Future

The star of the show will, of course, is A Feast Reborn's food and vendors. In their inaugural year, Snow said A Feast Reborn had just under a dozen culinary partners filling out their stalls. Last year, that number rose to 15. A Feast Reborn has doubled that for the event running the weekend after Patch 6.5 releases, with 30 vendors across two days of festivities providing roleplaying and recipes to attendees. The festival attracts big names in the roleplaying community, like Dueling Otters, Whispered Wish, Bandee Pakshee, Spice & Miqo’te, Jade Cat, and many others. The types of food offered are often analogous to real-world cuisine ranging from taco trucks to Indian fusion to classical pub faire.

Many of the attending venues also chose to support the event as sponsors, providing prizes and in-game currency to cover the expenses of the event. Snow even briefly closed sponsorships, worried that people had the impression vendors had to be sponsors. The Final Fantasy 14 event is expensive to run, as many of the providers of services for A Feast Reborn charge for their services, and the prizes given out over the event cost both gil and time to come by, especially houses.

“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 try to feed back into our community by helping other venues and doing things. We do our Santa photos every Christmas [the Starlight Celebration], 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.”

Snow also wanted to point out that A Feast Reborn’s logo has evolved over the years alongside the festival’s scale and sponsorship. The mascots, Cinnamon and Penelope, are a pair of chocobos (red and turquoise respectively) who have over the years met for a picnic and eaten part of the logo. Snow is looking for input on their continued adventures.