culinarian

What FFXIV’s Culinarian quest does is give us a well-crafted glimpse of the emotional and psychological journey to reach that nightmare, albeit with an unsurprisingly sentimental conclusion.

The Culinarian quest is, if anything, an optimistic message that we should have more Debroyes and fewer Galveroches in food tech, and that more RPGs can and should approach food as more than throwaway consumables.

This isn’t a Silicon Valley doomsday scenario, but the Culinarian questline in Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker set in the isolated city of Old Sharlayan.

And while I’ve played plenty of games in speculative settings where worldbuilding relies on miserable food, the Culinarian’s unassuming journey opens a door into a rather unexplored realm: the connection between video game culture and startup attitudes toward eating, in an age fixated on technological progress.

Faced with the coming apocalypse, the Culinarian must help nutrition student Debroye with the seemingly impossible task of making panaloaf edible.